All Cultures Are Equal. But Some Cultures Are More Equal Than Others.

Ugh. Another "honor" killing . Stories like this make me want to say,

FUCK CULTURE.

Autumn Walk

I love fall colors! When I walked out of the house on Spring Garden this afternoon, it was sprinkling and the skies were dull and gray. Bummer, I thought. As I walked into the city, though, I passed by a park with one tree gloriously ablaze with red-orange autumn leaves, standing among a dozen ordinary green ones. It was the picture of Vibrance, the tree of Life. L'Chaim!

The skyscrapers of Market Street were shrouded in fog, and umbrellas hovered and bobbed all around me despite the fact that it was barely precipitating. In front of me, one bright orange and yellow umbrella paced the sidewalk among a dozen dull, solid-colored ones, protecting a woman from the non-rain. She walked in silence among sharp, serious-looking businessmen, who walked in equal silence. Dreary weather makes city-folk so silent! I thought to myself while listening.

The aroma of bacon and eggs and sweet-and-sour sauce and other food truck smells wafted with the autumn breeze, assaulting our noses and making one girl behind me exclaim to her friend, "Oh my GOD, that SMELL! It smells so..." I crossed the street and didn't hear the following adjective.

As I was about to walk down the steps from Naked Chocolate Cafe, a small, square gutter caught my eye. It was ringed all around with bright marigold leaves like a lion's mane, the foliage, wet and bright, stuck to the stony ground- but it was not roaring! Just glistening in silence.

Early this morning, inside the house on Spring Garden, I shared a hot cup of black chai tea and Trader Joe's canned chicken soup with my "Mishka" before he had to dash off to catch a plane to China. I had stayed up all night to keep him company as he prepared for his trip. While he scratched his head- through his new Johnny Depp/Reverse-Mohawk haircut- trying to figure out what to pack and how to pack it, I made him three cranes imbued with messages about flying for good luck and he added these talismen* to his luggage, along with his GRE material and musty-smelling Dalai Lama Halloween costume. Before I knew it, he was gulping down soup and rushing out the door for his ride, and after a few hours of sleep, I was leaving for my autumn walk in the non-rain.

*It should be "talismen" for the plural form. "Talismans" sounds so ungrammatical.

Les Im-memorables & Where the Wild Things Are

This evening, I was browsing through the fiction section at Barnes, when I spotted Victor Hugo's Les Miserables on the shelf. "Ooh, I've been wanting to read that!" I said to myself.* So I grabbed it off the shelf, grabbed a couple other books, and then sat down to read. I turned over Les Mis and started reading the back. Wait...Jean Valjean? I knew that name! A couple lines later, I realized that I had already read this book!

This is why sometimes I think reading is such a waste of time. I gave that book hours of my life, and a few years later, it's like I never read it at all! WTF?! On the other hand, if I could do that with Harry Potter...man if only.

Before I left, I sat down with "Where the Wild Things Are." It's really quite an amazing book. While I walked home in the darkness and misty rain, I tried to figure out what made it so good, despite the fact that nothing much really happens in the story. I came to the conclusion that one major element was the moment when the world inside the kid's mind merged with the world we know as real. This merging occurred ultra-smoothly in two places:

1st: When the kid gets sent to bed without supper, and starts dreaming, only it's written in the kid's perspective: rather than writing "The boy began dreaming", the author wrote "That night in his room, a forest grew...and grew...until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world around"; and

2nd: At the end, when he's still dreaming, he smells something delicious cooking, so he decides to abandon the monsters and return to his bedroom where dinner awaits him. Of course (in my opinion anyway), he was just waking up from his dream.

The transition between worlds is so seamless, it's breathtaking. Like transitions between real dreams, actually.

*In fact, it was NOT the one I've been meaning to read. I was confusing it with War & Peace, which I bought along with an anthology of spy stories

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 10: Sean Connery Takes Me to the Red Sea

I was quite dreading coming back to work after 2 weeks of vacation traveling, but now that I'm back and cruising through the highways of Erbil again, and getting laughed at by the Kurdish taxi driver who seems to find my Asian eyes and nose really fucking hilarious, I find I've actually missed this dusty ole place with its hole-in-the-wall restaurants selling fake pizzas, and gutter-lined bazaars displaying the tackiest clothes, and the highway picnics, which now include roaring fires because it is so cold these days, and the Kurds themselves who are very kind to us foreigners everywhere we go. Settled into my spacious apartment once again, I feel like I've come home- a feeling that had gone amiss during my vagabondish travels from hotel to hotel the last two weeks. Traveling and seeing the world is fun and interesting, but there is always that seed of loneliness that accompanies you every step of the way, no matter how welcoming the people are, and it really blooms when you're sitting alone in your hotel room on New Year's Day. 

Luckily, I met the kindest taxi driver at the Amman airport. He had the voice of Sean Connery minus the strange 'sh' lisp, and he disapparated my blues away by the sheer goodness of his heart. Before heading down to Aqaba, he drove me to downtown Amman where we stopped by at a kebab restaurant to grab a bite to eat. When I entered the restaurant, I saw a man laying down a small rug and then kneeling down on it to pray to the Almighty. On the way out, another man had taken over his spot and was taking his turn to pray and bow prostrate to the floor. Jordanians are a very religious crowd. It is hard to compare them to the religiosity of the Kurds because I am always in school during the day until 4 pm, but just the fact that I have met so many unreligious Kurds at this officially non-denominational school gives me the impression that Jordanians are the more religious, though by no means fanatical. In fact, from my chats with Jaser, the taxi driver, I get the impression that Jordan is a fairly peaceful bit of land in the otherwise torrid Middle East, where the inhabitants feel favorably toward their king and queen for the most part, where the currency is worth more than the dollar, where the poverty level is not bad at all, and where the cab drivers are gentlemen. But of course, this impression stems from one person's experience during one day in Jordan, so it is mostly meaningless, and very likely false. Read on, and dare to be misled! 

As we made the 3.5-hour drive down to Aqaba in the southernmost tip of Jordan, I was fairly quiet, but I asked him some questions and found out that many Jordanians do speak both Arabic and English, and on a personal note, that he had lived in Kuwait for 17 years, had a couple daughters- one of them married and teaching English in Amman, another still in college- and his wife had recently fallen sick and was hospitalized. I took a long nap under the afternoon sun, and woke up to find that the landscape had changed into something incredible- huge, red, jagged mountains rising from the flat desert plains. They reminded me of Kurdistan, the way the mountains just completely eclipsed and dominated the land for miles, and the way they filled me with awe, but they were different too- not rounded softly and dimpled, nor brown, but jagged, edgy and iron red. We passed by several signs pointing to Petra, and I was tempted at each one to ask Jaser to turn into one of them, but in the end, I was in the mood to chill so I let him drive on southward. Soon I saw a shimmering blue oval in the distance which was the Red Sea, and Jaser pointed out the cluster of buildings to the right. “That is Eilat, in Israel.” Wow, I was seeing Israel! I stopped to take a picture like a good tourist. 

“If we take this other road for about 20 hours, we can be in Saudi Arabia,” he added. Wow, how strange to be so close...

He dropped me off at a super-fancy “international” hotel and said he would grab a bite to eat and pray and then come back to pick me up. While lying on a lounge chair perched in the sand , mere feet away from the pristine blue Red Sea, I thought how unreasonable I was to have paid a taxi driver so much money to drive so far just to spend 2.5 hours at a hotel beach. I could have stayed at the airport and spent no money, or I could have gone to Petra for less money and seen an ancient rose-red city carved from the rocks. Instead, given 14 hours in Jordan, I chose to go as far south as one could go from the airport for 2.5 hours of relaxation and doing absolutely nothing at a glitzy hotel beach, without even a swimsuit to enjoy the sparkling waters of the jacuzzi and pools. The idea just screamed unreasonable and silly, and yet I felt no regret because this was the year I had no one to think of but myself, the year I had no one to answer to or follow except my own whims and fancies, no matter how unreasonable or silly they seemed. 

At the end of the 2.5 hours, I walked out the hotel and felt unreasonably happy to see my kind taxi driver waiting there for me just like he had promised, and during the 3.5 hour drive back, I decided to befriend him the best way I knew how to befriend a stranger in a foreign land- by asking him how to say this and that in his native tongue. I fancied the idea of learning the entire Arabic language during a 3.5 hour car ride in Jordan, though I knew that this was just as unreasonable as the rest of my ideas that day. How do you say “unreasonable” in Arabic? I should have asked him that...The language lesson eased into actual conversation in English, and he told me about his travels all over the Middle East and in Germany. I just loved how every time I asked him about each country he visited, whether it was nice there, he responded with the most genuine “Sure, sure” followed by some positive adjective or another like “wonderful” or “lovely”. I am drawn to people with monotonously (but genuinely) positive attitudes. I loved the way he said “Sure” because it felt like Sean Connery was sitting next to me, saying “Sure, sure” over and over again. Night fell long before we reached our destination, and I happened to look out the window at one point and was awed by all the stars that were visible in the desert sky. “I'll have to come back in the spring when it's warmer and go camping in the desert under these stars,” I told Jaser, “do you think that would be nice?” “Sure,” said Sean. 

We got to talking about religion and his married daughter. “You know why I like Islam?” He told me he liked Islam because Islam says daughters must bring their love interest home and he must ask the parents for permission to marry or date her. “It is not like that in other places. I saw this in Germany!” he insisted, “In Germany, I saw, they bring many boys home, and don't tell the father and mother.” I nodded, amused by his fatherly concern. I told him I was still as single as ever. “That is good! You are young, you should do other things.” I agreed but it would be nice to do these “other things” with someone by my side to share with. “I hope you will find a Muslim man,” he said, “Muslim men are good. You know, in the Qur'an, it says once you are married, you must never look at anyone else. You must look after your wife and no one else. And I- believe me! I never look anywhere else, I look only after my wife,” he insisted vehemently. I believed him 100%, thinking about his sick wife and how beloved she was by this man. “I hope one day, you will be with a Muslim man,” said he, “inshallah!” I nodded, at the very least pleased by his well-wishes. By this time, my blues were completely washed away by the grace and tide of well-wishes of this kind old man who cared enough to wish me a good Muslim man for a husband. I could not and cannot see myself with a Muslim man, but that was beside the point. Was all of Jordan's taxi service serviced by a league of extraordinary gentlemen such as my taxi driver? I wondered later at the airport. 

According to one of my Canadian colleagues who I ran into at the Amman airport, and who had spent several days in Jordan camping in the desert with the Bedouins and climbing Petra on a donkey, this was actually true: Jordan's taxi drivers are extraordinarily and unreasonably nice. She also said the Bedouins lied to her about how nice the tent was going to be, that it was really weird at first getting scrubbed down by another woman at the Turkish bath, and that Petra was “really amazing actually.” So there's a second point of view for y'all. I was so overjoyed to see her and all the Lebanese teachers who happened to share my flight. I had loads of fun telling them about my adventures in their home country- the Music Hall, Jeita, the shopping, the Mediterranean, the music, the people, my New Year's Eve at Dunkin' Donuts-, as well as about my trip to Egypt- the traffic, the donkeys among the traffic, the baksheesh, the Pyramids and the Sphinx, the Nubian village, the racist boatman-, and about my unreasonable trip down to Aqaba with Sean Connery. One of the best parts about traveling comes after the fact- when you're telling stories.

That was the best part about coming home to Kurdistan. I loved sharing my stories and hearing all about the individual adventures of my colleagues who had gone elsewhere- Dubai, Thailand, Turkey, Jordan. And boy did I miss a lot of people here. I was surprised by how happy I felt to see some of their faces and by the genuine affection I felt for people whom I'd met just 4 months ago. Some were greeted with huge bear hugs where the feet momentarily left the floor, others with 3 kisses on the cheek (left-right-left; in the Jordan aiport, I saw Jordanian men do one kiss to the left, then four consecutive kisses to the right!), and others with just an overjoyed “heyyyyyy!” because some just aren't the touchy-feely type, though they were no less missed. So many ways of saying hello.

One was greeted with a handshake and introduction. We have yet another new teacher here- a young American girl fresh out of college, but already a globe-trotter. I'm grateful for her company as much as she is for mine, and we are together determined to make the most out of our last 6 months in Iraqi Kurdistan. Today right after school ended, we had an adventure trying to find a taxi out into the city, and ended up hitching a ride from a man posing as a taxi driver, who was clearly not a taxi driver because his car lacked the distinctive orange markings of an Erbil taxi. But hey, we were desperate. Then we roamed through the labyrinthian Lenga bazaar, shared a lahambajeen (the fake pizza I was referring to earlier), cabbed it back to the school and here is where I apparently provided endless amusement for the taxi driver just by looking Asian. Attempted to get hooked on The Wire (still not happenin'), and finally drifted off sleepily to our respective pads. What is the big deal with The Wire? I'll give it three more chances before I ditch it forever and move on to the John Adams drama or Arrested Development.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a much more successful viewing. It made me think a lot about getting old, about the intense similarities between babies and old people, about the beauty of ballet, and about my hotel stays in Lebanon and Egypt. Watch the movie and you'll see what I mean. It is long (because it has to be), and poetic, and reminds me of Forrest Gump. 

Jiro, one of our young school guards, stands in front of the stoops of our apartment complex. He often reminded me of a loafing hound: lazy and loyal.

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 9: New Year's at Dunkin' Donuts

I spent New Year's Eve 2008 at a Dunkin' Donuts in Beirut with a group of strangers, drinking a wonderfully hot cup of green tea. How did this come to pass? It all began when I flew back into Beirut having no idea how I was going to spend the next two or three days, which also happened to be the very last day of 2008 and the very first days of 2009. I figured I'd just walk out and let things happen to me, come what may. I was very tired from having slept on a train the night before, and so I quickly garnered a hotel room on the Hamra for a decent price considering it was New Year's Eve, and crashed on the generous-sized bed without setting my alarm. 

I woke up a couple hours later and checked my watch: Yikes, it was 10 minutes to midnight! I was about to miss the coming of the New Year in an amazing city like Beirut, no less! I threw on a scarf and coat, and rushed out, throwing out a “happy new year!” to the hotelier at the reception desk. But where was I rushing off too? I hailed a cab and asked him to take me to the waterfront so that I could see the Mediterranean Sea by night one more time. Looking outward, it was dark and more space-like than ever, and the waves were angrier than ever, bursting into white ocean spray like the fireworks set off by a group of teenagers hanging out nearby. Shivering in the freezing night, I wandered down the Corniche and into a posh looking restaurant lobby. Anywhere to avoid frostbite. 

“Can I get a cup of tea?”

“Does it look like you can get a cup of tea right now?” the young receptionist pointed at the glass double doors that led to the actual restaurant. Inside, a mad drunken New Year's Eve party was shaking the house down. House music, confetti, and drunken ladies, short silver dresses and black suits, shiny black shoes and shaking stilettos- this was a party for the young and rich. I was young, but not rich.

“Each of those guests payed $200 just to get in.”

Jesus, they must be swimming in champagne.

“Go on in, the party's already started a while ago,” said the receptionist, whose name was Daniel, “You should have come an hour ago- the waves were huge then!”

So I walked in. 

Later, once Daniel was released from his work duties, he invited me to come hang out with him and some friends for his own New Years' celebration. In fact, he hadn't made plans because he'd been given the New Year's shift, so that's how we ended up at Dunkin' Donuts in the wee hours of the first morning of 2009. He introduced me to his friends- a brother and sister and their young uncle-, and we all sat down with hot tea or coffee. 

The young uncle, happened to have lived in Egypt for years, so I regaled them with tales from my Egypt trip. How we nearly died several times in the crazy traffic while bracing ourselves in taxis, and crossing the streets on foot. How, among the chaos of cars, bicycles, honking, and fumes, you just as well see a donkey's ass or a herd of sheep. Why not? If you don't have a car, but you have a donkey, why not? Anything goes as a mode of transportation in Egypt. And the hassling. Really, the worst form of marketing I've ever experienced. “Donkey? camel? Elephant? Helicopter?” I demanded, imitating the dozens of Egyptian hasslers we had encountered, with their outrageous offerings. I swear one of them offered me a unicorn. But I said no because I was never a fan of single-horned creatures. They will say anything, just to get your attention. They even hassle about not hassling! “No hassle, no hassle! No charge for looking! Just come into my shop, take your time, I promise, no hassle in my shop! No problem, no charge for looking, just come in, no hassle!” We even saw signs over the windows saying advertising “no hassle”. What a reputation these Egyptians have. 

“You have to understand, though,” said the young uncle, “Cairo alone is a city of 25 million- and 85% of them are poor.” In a nation in which poverty was the norm, begging has become a business, with the official name of “baksheesh”. Even the cops did it. Despite all the craziness, the young uncle claimed that he missed Cairo. “Compared to Cairo, Beirut is dead. Cairo is so alive! People never sleep, nothing ever shuts down.” Funny...this was exactly what I said about Beirut, compared to Erbil. Talk about relative!

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 8: Dancing With Nubians, Speaking in Idioms

The visit to the Nubian village in Aswan, a city south of Luxor, was the other high-light of the trip. We arrived in Aswan at night and had pizza and extremely tangy, deep-pink hibiscus tea on a wooden boat-restaurant that was forever moored. Already, I liked Aswan better than Luxor. It was late at night, and the atmosphere felt as tranquil as the waters of the Nile on which the boat floated, a lone cat wandered around the boat and between our legs as we drank our tea- tired from our trip, but happy to have arrived at last after a long 12-hour train ride. No other customers were around, and the waiter was friendly and open, bundled up in a thick coat and hat and earmuffs and rubbing his hands together to keep the chill of the Nile air from freezing even his girth. The next day, we took a ferry out and ventured onto Elephantine Island which took only a few minutes to reach by ferry. 

As we wandered through the narrow dirt paths of the village, between the low walls of the bright and colorful mud-brick homes, running into adorable wobbly-legged sheep grazing from trash pile to trash pile, I couldn't help thinking “This was Africa.” I mean, duh, Egypt was officially on the African continent, but Cairo is more Middle Eastern than African. Here on Elephantine Island in southern Egypt, the people were dark like Africans, their clothes were bright, colorful and cheery, the women were bold and not the least bit reserved even if they wore the traditional Muslim garb. During our exploration of this more “African” region of Egypt, we happened upon a preschool, and a minute later, found ourselves in the schoolyard, dancing with a bunch of 3- and 4-year olds to rhythmic music playing from a cheap boombox. They'd seen us peeking in and immediately invited us in. The boombox was switched on and the little 3-4 year-olds started doing their morning dance. It reminded me a lot of how I always started out the school day with “head and shoulders, knees and toes” or “itsy-bitsy spider” with my own KG's. The kids here were so much tamer, I thought, thinking of my particularly rambunctious boys back in Kurdistan. Also, they were allowed to lay around if they pleased, or to dance in circles hand-in-hand if this they pleased, and there was no concern about maintaining order in a classroom. The children were not shy, and did not hesitate to take our hand and bring us into their dance circles, and some of them were fairly good dancers. 

We took all this in stride and came, danced, paid and left as if nothing unusual had happened, moving on to whatever was to be our next adventure on this strange island. We wandered around and happened upon little Mohammed and his family of women- a mother and a bunch of aunts and sisters I think, or maybe just aunts. There, we had tea, played with the little toddler, saw some wedding photos, paid and left. At the end of our wandering through the small island, we stood at the top of a hill overlooking the water near where the ferry was to arrive and took photos of the village and the palm trees; of the woman in a black burkha carrying a pot on her head as she gracefully made her way down the dirt hill, barefoot and brown, old, yet back as straight as an arrow (or else how would she carry all those things on her head?); of the feluccas along the Nile framed like a painting by the whitewashed bricks of a window frame. Soon, we hopped into the ferry, boys and girls on separate sides, and headed back to the East bank of Aswan, which was so vastly different from this Nubian village, though only a short ferry ride away. 

Hot dog

A sheep studies its shadow

A cat roams the low rooftops of the mudbrick homes.

The cat was an animagus!

Picturesque felucca, visible through a glass-less window

The train trip back to Cairo from Aswan was much more pleasant because giant flies did not buzz around our faces all night. It would have been equally as miserable because the AC was cranked way up, though it was the dead of winter and freezing at night (yes, Cairo gets cold!), and I might have ended up like the Little Match Girl if David hadn't saved the night by pulling out his extra coats, bulky and snug and inviting in that meat-freezer of a train. Brrrrrr! I kept my legs crossed all lady-like almost the entire time in order to keep as much of my body heat trapped as possible, and refused to eat or drink anything for the next 12 hours in an attempt to avoid using the train bathrooms (- Success!). I can withstand many discomforts while traveling, but for some reason, I have an intense aversion to dirty bathrooms. Surprisingly, I got a decent amount of sleep on that long train ride, and this time without the company of a gaggle of giggly Egyptian girls playing violent hitting games, or a hobbit-haired French child who liked to repeat phrases like “ba-NA-na cake” and “un grand camion!” over and over again. (That was during the three- or five-hour trip from Luxor to Aswan. Not that I minded their company.) 

Back in Cairo, a local who spoke in English idioms took us to a kosri joint, which just turned out to be that macaroni-and-tomato sauce dish we had had just outside the train station to Luxor. Somehow we ended up paying for our unofficial guide's meal, too. Then he took us to an outdoor teahouse, where we sat around in the nippy morning downing hot, sweet tea and talking to our tour guide. He was of Bedouin descent, married with 5 children, and intensely studying the English language. He really loved idioms. He seemed to think idioms brought a conversation from a level 1 to a level 10 in terms of interest and intellect. We talked about the shoe-at-Bush incident, as we seemed to do with all the locals we ran into. After paying for the tea, we were thinking about heading back, but then the guy insisted we pop into a perfume shop. A perfume shop, as it turns out, is more of a theatre than a shop. The four of us and the tour guide took seats set up around the periphery of the small shop, underneath shelves of unlabeled glass bottles full of heady liquids. After taking the trouble to go out and buy us more tea (I had more tea during my 2-week winter vacation than I had during my entire lifetime, no joke!), the owner of the shop (who, coincidentally, was also of Bedouin descent) then put on a show which was really “the longest sale ever”, as David put it, at the end of which Alice and I felt obliged to buy something. I bought a tiny bottle of all-natural, alcohol-free rose petal perfume, and I think Alice got the lotus scent, made popular by Cleopatra according to our salesman. Our local guide made some randy comment about using the perfume to make an upside-down Pyramid on a woman, which turns men into Arabian horses. I don't think it was an idiom. Anyway, we left the perfume shop, said goodbye to our guide, and returned to our hotel Arabesque. 

........................

I had to leave the rest of the traveling group early, after our visit to the huge and well-manicured Al-Azhar Park, because my plane was to take off in the early evening. I said goodbye to the group before they headed to the Northern Cemetery, a bit disappointed that I wouldn't be able to go with them. After all, it seemed I was developing a habit of visiting cemeteries wherever I went- from the Pyramids and Valley of the Kings where King Tut had been discovered, to the humbler one in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq. It would have made sense to top off the trip to Egypt with a visit to the space where the living lived among the dead. Anyway, I said goodbye and caught a cab, assuming that with the hotel business card in hand, it would be cake finding it even if I really had no idea where it was in the mammoth city of Cairo. What an assumption. We drove around for an eternity, asking for directions from cops, other taxi drivers, and other locals, but no one knew where it was. Then, when we finally figured out where we had to go, we got stuck in the one of Cairo's infamous gridlock traffic jams, moving at a snail's pace, if we were moving at all. Crawling in traffic, I burst out laughing as a man on a donkey suddenly cut in front of us, its big white donkey booty bobbing up and down, utterly undaunted by the sea of cars surrounding it. And then at one point, all the cars stopped for a sheep crossing, the shepherd herding his woolly charges through the cars with his stick as if this was all normal, which of course it is, in Cairo. 

What a city, so colorful and animated...chaotic, its dirty streets swimming with cars, donkeys, sheep and shepherds; men riding bikes with dining table-sized boards on their head, piled high with bread; shapely women using their head as a third arm to carry their groceries, wobbling not even once and swinging from the waist down with grace; men in dresses; destitute citizens demanding baksheesh left and right for every little favor, for every step taken, for every turn of a screw, and every fallen leaf. The cab driver was amused that I was amused. To him, it was all normal, but he knew that it was all foreign to me, a great circus act, with all the balance but no order. I had known it was going to be this way from the moment the plane landed: as soon as the wheels touched the ground, the entire plane seemed to rise as every single passenger stood up in unison (the last orderly act I witnessed until I got out of Egypt) and made a mad rush for their luggage in the storage areas above, some even making a mad dash toward the front of their plane, trying to get as close as possible to the front exit before the aisle got crowded, as if they'd been waiting with their bags ready and eyeing the exit door like an eagle eyeing its prey or a runner eyeing the finish line from his starting place, ready to bolt forward like a bullet as soon as he heard the pistol shot. This was Egypt: chaotic, dirty, and poor, abandoning all pretense and leaving every man for himself to survive any way he knew how, even if it meant making a living out of pestering people, day in day out for a felucca ride, as little Mohammed's father did while the little boy hung around the colorful mud-brick house on Elephantine Island, unbothered by the flies all over his face, charming tourist-visitors into coming in and having Nubian tea, and earning a bit of baksheesh of his own.  

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 7: The Book of Hussein

Luxor is the city in southern Egypt divided into the West and East Bank of the Nile. The two banks on opposite shores of the river are polar opposites, and I didn't much like the East Bank where the hassling was especially bad along the waterfront, and there was nothing aesthetically pleasing about the place, none whatsoever. And this is coming from someone who can see beauty in a junkyard [rf: “hidden gems” post]. The other side- the West Bank- was a stark contrast from this ugly and uninteresting East Bank, for it contained the Valley of the Kings, where Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tut:

“At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues and gold everywhere the glint of gold.“

- the famous lines describing the moment of the most amazing discovery he would ever make. Gives me the shivers whenever I read it. Back in the days of ancient Egypt, people devoted a lot of time to attending to the dead. Also, there was a much more intense belief in the power of the written word, literally. The blue and gold paints were still in decent condition, and every inch of the tombs' rocky innards were covered with angular men and women, cartouches, and owls, ankhs, scarabs, quails, reeds, and other hieroglyphs that the ancients seemed to believe would protect and/or assist the dead just by being written- carved- into the stone walls of the chamber. We spotted several carvings of men with dicks erect at perfectly 90 degree angles, and in the coolest tomb (probably one of the Ramses, I forget which), there was an elaborate blue-and-gold painting of the story of the goddess who swallows and gives birth to the sun every day.

We nearly got into trouble with the police here because one of the unofficial guards waited around until he was sure we had taken pictures, then randomly chose Max to threaten with police action if he didn't give payment for the picture.

We were ALL taking pictures.

I just met another Egyptian here in Erbil, and mentioned the opinion that most Egyptians are poor, so this whole corrupt baksheesh culture should be considered in a sympathetic light. The Egyptian shook his head and said it was more than poverty; it was a social sickness. Thinking of this particular incident in which the self-appointed guard quite deviously walked away in order to give us time to sneak pictures, and then returned to catch us red-handed- makes me want to side with the second opinion. They can be nasty. They can be unpleasant. The corruption can be sickening. Perhaps it is a sickness that ought to be treated. The part that makes me mad is that he acted as if he had all the authority in the world to charge us, threaten us, snatch one of our phones without permission, and blackmail us, when in reality, he had not a shred of authority to do any of the above. It also pissed me off when I would go to the bathroom and have to tip someone just for handing me a paper towel, when I could damn well have gotten it myself. Did I ask for the service? Uh, no...Did the owner of the building ask you to stand at the door collecting coins? Uh, no! Well, I can't be too sure about that. And maybe I'm just being an utter snob.

After encounters like this and all the hassling, it was really nice and a huge relief to meet Hussein. Hussein was the taxi driver who drove us to and from Hetsepshut, the pillared structure built right into the face of a mountain, still somewhere on the West Bank of Luxor.

In his hand he holds an ankh, the symbol for eternal life. So much for that.

Dogs mirror the Colossi of Memnon

On the way to Hetsepshut, he showed us a little notebook he carried around with him in the cab, each page filled with a message from travelers from all over the world who had been chauffered by Hussein, messages in their respective languages, including one in Korean. I could tell this little book meant a lot to him. It was like his well-worn passport, except he never went anywhere; people came to him and brought their exotic letters and words and marked his book with them like souvenirs, as proof that he had seen the world through others' eyes, heard their stories, seen what they looked like, heard what they sounded like. On the way from Hetsepshut, I kept asking him where he lived, whether we had passed his house yet, how 'bout now? How 'bout now? Until he got the unsubtle hint and invited us all over for tea. I don't think I had aimed to get invited to his house, but now that I think about it, I guess that's what it sounded like.

We drove toward the road to Aswan. I remember low, colorful walls on either side and a long, straight road. It was around sunset. He parked on the left side, we crossed the street, and followed him past the wall and into his home. It was spacious, there were many rooms with colorful walls in sky blues and sea greens- even a good-sized guest room with piles of thick blankets like in the Princess and the Pea-, but it was all unmistakably poor. The stall-like bathrooms with holes in the ground for pissing and dumping were fulsome-looking, I remember, but the walls were a cheery sky blue. One room was being used as a barn to house his pigeons, chickens, and a cow that had given birth just days ago (so that would make it 2 cows). Pigeons were good for sex, Hussein told us. Was everything slightly exotic good for sex? I wondered. One side of the house was being built up into a restaurant. Rather than saving up a lot of money over a long period of time and then building the restaurant all at once, Hussein was building it up a few stones at a time, making small progress every week or every month, but progress nonetheless. I liked his patience, his self-created purposes. He was going to call his restaurant “Sunset” because just over the back wall of where the restaurant was going to be, the guests would have a great view of the sunset every evening over his neighbor's field of several acres.

During the tour, we'd met his adorable 2-year-old son whose name I can't recall, and afterward, we met the rest of his family- his daughter and his brother's family because his brother had died, or something. There were a lot of women there is all I remember, and they all came forward and shook our hands without hesitation, without the modesty or the downward gaze decreed by their religion when woman meets man, though the older women wore the black burkhas. In southern Egypt, it seemed, Islam took on a more cultural significance rather than a religious one. We sat with Hussein on a wooden bench propped against a wall in the sitting room. The women built a roaring fire right on the dirt floor for the nightly family gathering, and they served us sweet tea. He did not have lots of money, Hussein admitted to us, but he had a large extended family to care for, and that cared for him in return. He was rich here, said the taxi driver, putting his large palm over his heart. In the firelight, Hussein's little son danced around for us in the silly way that kids dance. I can't believe I still think kids are cute after finding out what devils they can be.  I wrote a short message in his little notebook and we all signed it, making our mark in the Book of Hussein.

The next day, I sat in a felucca with two Jews and an anti-Semitic, chauvinist boatman, waiting futilely for the wind to pick up. It never picked up. We picked up and left for the train station.

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 6: Saladin's Kingdom

On Christmas morning 2008, I woke up in a hotel room with three Jews. The night before, while everyone else was asleep, I had gone for a walk around the neighborhood and happened to buy a box of Middle Eastern desserts like baklava and stuff from a sweets shop around the corner. We dug into these before heading downstairs for the usual hotel breakfast, which just barely passed the “edible” mark, despite all appearances. After the first morning, I pretty much just had tea or nescafe. I think this was the day we visited the Citadel of Saladin (12th century Sultan of Egypt and Syria and legendary military commander, who was actually of Kurdish origin!), where we entered several mosques, including the famous Mohammed Ali mosque, and climbed some old crumbling stone-brick structure with towers and steeply spiraling staircases and a beautiful view of Cairo's cityscape of pencil gray buildings that matched the grayness of the winter sky that day, and were hung all over with colorful laundry. I selfishly hoped that the dwellers of this city would never adopt automatic dryers; without the laundry hung over all the balconies, the Cairo cityscape would be dull indeed.

Keeper of Shoes

Modern Cairo through an ancient window

Dave and Alice make their escape

Max surveys his kingdom

Sitting precariously on a ledge

I want to climb a tree in every nation.

Denile is a river in Egypt

Another night, we visited the Cairo tower which was supposed to afford a most amazing view of the city, especially during sunset. We got there after dark, so decided not to go up that night. But I did get a picture of that black vulture-like emblem that adorns the front of the tower as well as the flag of Egypt.

Later, I discovered that this fierce-looking bird was not a vulture, but an eagle- the Eagle of Saladin, the symbol of Arab nationalism, also later adopted by Saddam's Baathist party* and the Nazis. Saladin is turning out to be a vastly interesting historical figure, and I'm now wishing I'd read more about him before going to Egypt, so I could have looked for the eagle carving on the western wall of the Citadel, if it even exists anymore. Anyway, we came back to the tower during our last night in Cairo before heading down to Luxor, but the sunset escaped us once again because the line for the elevator was so long. Nevertheless, the view from the top was pretty nice- like seeing Paris from the Eiffel Tower, except here we could see a huge soccer field, a tiny soccer field, and a swimming pool among other things, and the Nile of course. I dunno why it's the sports arenas I remember. It was freezing so we took a seat at the cafe, which wasn't terribly fancy, but had a small tray of little red stones on the table as decoration that Alice seemed to like. Alice and I had a nice long chat about books. Back at the hotel, as we sat around on the lobby couches, waiting to go to the train station, we played a game called “2 f***u's and a surprise”. Alice won the surprise- one of the little red stones from the Cairo tower cafe.

While waiting just outside the train station, we shared a bowl of macaroni-and-tomato sauce at a hole-in-the-wall macaroni-and-tomato sauce joint whose floor was covered with wood chips. I went exploring and passed many shisha-and-shai cafes full of men with smoke blowing out of their mouth and nostrils, and steam rising from their teacups. And interestingly, I discovered a large shisha-and-shai house where the men sat around smoking, drinking tea, and playing some hard-core chess. Before heading back to the train station, I picked up some sweet Egyptian bread, a bag of honey-roasted chestnuts, and a marriage proposal (I said no). We took a 12-hour train down to Luxor that night, accompanied by all these Egyptian men in dresses (I can't help thinking of them as dresses, even though they're just the traditional Egyptian garb for men) and turbans, a man who made a strange droning sound the entire time, a man who looked as old as the Pyramids who was unable to walk by himself and yet insisted on taking a walk through the narrow aisle every half-hour, taking about half the time it took to build the Pyramids to walk a single train-length. And flies. Welcome to 2nd class trains in Egypt, folks! It felt like the Septa in Philly- dirty, with the token crazy guy(s). The door right in front of me kept swinging open and shut all night because of the men selling tea and bread, and because of that ancient man who enjoyed taking walks. It was a restless night for me. It was a miserable night for one of my traveling companions. (Cipro anyone?) At one point, I woke up from my half-sleep, looked out the window, and saw a beautiful countryside view, of lush, green and golden fields and palm trees, the sky a pale yellow and white. At another point, I woke up, looked out the same window, and saw an amazing deep-pink and red sunrise. Surreal images between sleep, seen through a smudged window of a train chugging through Egypt.

*Months later, I bought a rusty Ba'athist eagle insignia for $5 at an antique shop in Erbil. To this day, I don't know what to do with it.

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 5: Egypt

I arrived at the Cairo airport at night. Crap! Cairo was just as freezing as Lebanon, at least at night. I had been hoping to be greeted by warm, beach-like weather that would magically evaporate my sickness away, but no such luck, even in a desert country! Staring out the cab window, I was shocked by the size and sprawl of the city. The highway we drove through was very wide, and we passed lots of tall buildings and huge billboards and huge everything else. For a moment, I felt like I was driving through Houston, Texas because everything was so huge and sprawled out, but then we passed by several huge glittery mosques and it brought me back to reality. This was Cairo, and it was huge! Or at least it seemed so as I sped through it in a cab from the airport to Hotel Havana. The taxi driver had come from the hotel to pick me up. He spoke fairly fluent English and had the radio tuned to a station playing American music- '80s classics to be more specific. Bon Jovi to be more specific. “I love Bon Jovi,” said Ahmed, the driver. “Me too!” I said. “It's my life,” he rejoindered. I nodded, smiling, thinking he meant something like Bon Jovi was the soundtrack to his life, the music that defined the prime of his life. A minute later, I got smart and realized he was talking about the song “It's My Life (it's now or never!)”.

Once at the hotel, I walked through the corridor along one of the upper floors, wondering what my travel companions would be like. I turned a corner and ran into two strangers- both with blond hair and glasses, a guy and a girl. Suddenly, I felt like Alice of Lewis Carroll's classic tale, after she ate the mushrooms. Had I grown, or had the halls and everything in it shrunk? It turns out, these short strangers were David's friends, two of the people I'd be traveling with for the next 8 days. Introductions were made, and then they showed me into our hotel room where I met David. I put down my suitcase at the foot of my bed and exclaimed over the comparative luxury of this hotel room. I threw myself on the bed and lay with my arms behind my head, and sighed with pleasure. It was nice to not be completely alone in such a big, foreign city like Cairo, and my travel companions seemed like a bunch of good-natured people. It was weird: as I lay there on the bed with my gaze toward the ceiling, I felt like Eric was sitting there on the bed next to mine. They were different, but shared just enough of the same traits to make it certain that they were brothers, especially in the way they spoke. What must it be like for people to meet me and Sarah separately? It must be mind-warping...Anyway, after sharing some stories, we hit the sack early because we wanted to start out super-early tomorrow, my first day in Cairo.

***The next day***

What can I say? I saw the Sphinx! I touched real Egyptian hieroglyphs! I climbed the Great Pyramid! And it was great! Actually, the climb up the inside of the pyramid was arduous, and I was hit with a wave of nausea at the top from dehydration. So at the moment, while we slowly made our way up the narrow, claustrophobia-inducing, railroad track-like path, hunching over for minutes at one point and sweating in the humid, stifling space, it didn't feel that great and I was wishing I was in far better shape. But, on the way back down, I was able to enjoy the iconic moment a lot more and when I got out into the light and the fresh, open air, I felt a rush from the climb, and all I could think was “Woah...I just climbed the Great Pyramid!” Finally, something to check off that damned List. 

"Get outta my ass!"

"Get outta my picture!"

David, one of my traveling buddies

It's the Borrowers!

These are not from a museum!

Two triangles

We had dinner that evening on an anchored restaurant-ship on the Nile. The view on the way down to the ship was pretty, the two lions sitting on their haunches at the end of the bridge, the subtle tones of the sunset, and the reflections on the slow-moving waters of the famed river. We crossed the walkway along the river and saw some strange sights that may go forever unexplained. To our left were dozens of park benches, and each one had a young couple perched on it and acting all couply- which in a Muslim nation like Egypt means nothing more than sitting close and holding hands. One couple though was stretching the boundaries and feeding each other potato chips. Only, when the guy held the chip up to the girl's lips, she completely ignored it and trained her huge mascara-lined eyes on the four of us instead, giving us the most seductive, cat-like look, her pointed eyebrows raised from under her headscarf as if to say “come hither”, her tongue sticking out ever so slightly and lolling about, anticipating the chip that dangled patiently between her boyfriend's/husband's fingers, but her cat eyes still glued seductively on us. 

WTF?

And then a few steps later, another girl in a long skirt and headscarf gave us the same seductive “come hither” stare- though her guy wasn't trying to feed her potato chips- and I did a double take because under the scarf her face, I swear, looked like the face of a man. Again, we'll never understand the real reasons for this flash mob-like charade, but there was something off about this entire walk to the restaurant-ship on the Nile. As I shared with the group later, during the dinner, I thought the entire scene with all the couples on the benches, the seducers, and the cross-dresser was a charade set up to freak out us foreigners, to inject a bit of surrealism into our tourism experience in Egypt. Just a theory! The dinner was amazing, especially the seasoned fried potatoes- the best I've ever had. And we got a basket of that Egyptian bread that looks like a giant version of those air bubbles you get sometimes on pizzas. It's like flatbread, but blown up like a balloon so that the inside is hollow. 

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 4: Saying Goodbyes

The day before I left Lebanon for Egypt, I went around the city revisiting people I'd met just days ago at random shops and restaurants. This could be a clever way of getting to know the city as well as the people who dwell in it, but really, I just wanted to thank them for their hospitality and kindness toward me, a complete stranger. I visited the crystal jewelry shop lady with voluminous wavy black hair, bedecked in gaudy jewelry and bold makeup. She showed me the reindeer she had made completely out of crystal gems strung cleverly together, I browsed through her little shop and bought a couple more things, and we chatted in French over extremely strong (must've been Turkish) coffee and Lebanese pastries. I lingered there a bit too long, said goodbye, and rushed out to catch a cab (not a moped this time) to Gemayzeh where I told the young owner of the Godfather restaurant all about my time in his country which he rarely got to enjoy himself, and promised him a souvenir from Egypt, or at least more stories. I stayed there overlong too, and by the time I said goodbye and rushed out, it was getting uncomfortably close to my departure time, and I wasn't sure if I had enough time to visit the wonderful couple who owned the artisan crafts shop along the Corniche. I hailed a cab and made my way down to the waterfront. Luckily, there wasn't much traffic along the road we were taking, so I got there in a few minutes (Beirut is such a tiny place I now realize). I wandered into their shop, the floor still scattered with real, crisp leaves, and they greeted me like an old friend. I told them all the things I'd seen in their country, about the water in the Jeita Grotto which was the color of that blue-greenish color in the painting that hung on that wall, but ever clearer, even more pure. 

The husband showed me a small teacup with only the dark, sludgy dregs of coffee left, the inner rim stained with a most interesting pattern. The cup had belonged to a customer, and the husband told me that the customer would receive news from Italy, pointing to a particular dark smudge that resembled a lady's high heel hanging off the inner rim's patterned chain. The “Italian shoe” he called it. It took me a minute to realize that he meant it resembled Italy, which looks like a shoe on the map. Cool! I thought. Another instance- like the rock sculptures in the Jeita Grotto- of forms in nature that accidentally resembled something man-made, though there had been no human conscience directing its formation. The wife started giving me a tour of their shop, and at the back of the shop, I gasped because a ginormous wave had just rushed up to the height of their store and seemed close enough to touch. She let me out the glass backdoor, and I stepped onto the platform and approached the ledge, awed by the enormity and ferociousness of the waves. What made the sea so angry? The tides rolled in like a stampede of white stallions and crashed thunderously against the boulders, white seafoam exploding spectacularly outward and upward, rising several feet high at times. My god, what a rush! The exploding waves blotted my camera with blizzard-like spots as I tried to capture them in action. I put down my camera and looked out to sea. Away from the shore, the waves appeared a lot calmer, an endless sheet of ice-blue. Gray sky stuffed with puffy white clouds like sheep in dire need of a good grooming matched the sullen, angry mood of the waves pounding at my feet. 

To me, a short-stay tourist from the West, who'd recently lived a few months in the Islamic country of Kurdistan, Lebanon was a phenomenon, a wonderful blend of the West and the Arab world, like the perfect blend of coffee and cream. What I loved most about Lebanon: one, they go all out for Christmas; two, the people are so open and friendly and welcoming and they (quite unlike Egyptians, as I discovered later) demand nothing in return for their kindness; three, they speak fluent English and/or French along with Arabic, and so the chance that I could communicate with a random person off the street was fairly great; and four, seize the day, seize the moment! This is the mindset of the Lebanese people. War? Bombs? No problem, we'll just rebuild everything the next day and party all night! Of course, with this great carpe diem attitude comes one of their greatest weaknesses- absolute materialism and superficiality. They love to party and look good while they party, and even when they are not partying they like to look good, and when they're completely past that partying age, they just like to look good. Period. Or as the Brits say: “Full stop.” 

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 3: The Pillsbury Doughboy Taxi Driver

The taxi drivers in Beirut are an interesting sector of Lebanese society. Most of the taxi drivers don't seem to speak much English or French, just Arabic. I had some great ones like Hazh who was like a grandfather to me. But I've also had some sleazy-ish ones who ask for friendship and then ask for an innocent coffee date, and I don't really want to guess what was on their mind when they asked for these things and then started driving into an area where people came to “make sex”. Lover's Point jutting out into the raging, deep space-like Mediterranean Sea. 

The worst one, though, was the one who tried to get me to hit his hand with a paddle. I refused of course, and was weirded out, sure, but I chose to stay in the cab and ignore his excessive honking and angry blabbering as well as his annoying habit of honking at all the pretty young girls as he drove by and ignoring the others who actually needed taxis. But after he drove around for nearly 40 minutes and dropped off everyone else until only I was left, I was getting seriously annoyed, especially when he asked me a second time to beat his pale, doughy hand with the damn paddle. I refused again and told him that that was enough ("halas" is such a useful phrase in the Mideast), so he put the paddle back into the side pocket of his door and continued to drive and shout and mutter and honk. My nerves were seriously exacerbated, but I figured I'd just bear it until we reached my desired destination- the ABC shopping mall that was supposed to be beautifully decorated for the holidays and crowded with shoppers.

It was when he pulled out the paddle for the 3rd time and asked me again to beat his hand with it, that I finally decided enough was enough, pushed the door open and jetted out into the night, slamming the door shut behind his fat, protesting head. Seething, I marched down the street past the gridlock traffic, having no idea if I was even going in the right direction; I just wanted to get the fuck away from this mad paddle-wielding doughboy. I stopped to ask two trustworthy-looking girls for directions, but then suddenly I heard him coming up behind me demanding his money. The nerve! The doughboy had left his taxi in the middle of traffic to chase after me and demand money for driving me around in his cab for nearly an hour and pleading for pleasure beatings? The nerve, the nerve! I turned around to face him and cursed at him very loudly. After cursing him out, I marched away down the street until I saw a cab with a decent-looking driver and a young clean-cut looking male passenger inside it in shotgun. “ABC Ashrafiyeh?” I asked, giving him my destination. To my great relief, he nodded and so I jumped into the back seat, shut the door, and turned back to see if the doughboy was still following me. Nope, no such luck. I wished he had been because then I would have taken that paddle and beat him over the head with it. I turned back to face the front and realized that the two guys in front were staring at me like “what's your story lady?” So I told them the entire ordeal, and they shook their heads in disbelief.

Names and backgrounds were exchanged, and I suddenly felt very grateful for their company and wished I could stay with them in the cab for the rest of the night where it was warm and safe and the people were kind and decent and not crazy. The passenger was a 29-year-old native who had lived in Kuwait for several years, had gone to school there, and now worked at a bank (or so he said- that comment is for my fellow agents) in Beirut. Near the mall, he offered to walk me to the entrance because the traffic was voluminous and it would be faster to just get out and walk the rest of the way, so we paid the driver, thanked him and got out. I studied the face of the banker by store-light and headlights as we walked side-by-side in the overall darkness. He had large, dark, serious eyes and a serious face but the most important thing was that he looked 100% sane and walked without a paddle and only a harmless, serious-looking briefcase.  As we walked, he told me about his job and sort of made a point that he lived alone in his apartment which we were approaching. I was feeling needy and a bit lonely at the moment after my harry experience with the Doughboy, and this part of me desperately wanted to accept his unspoken invitation, stranger though he was. We reached the crossroad where his apartment stood to one side and the mall to the other, but despite the millisecond's hesitation, I merely thanked him heartfeltly, wished him a Merry Christmas, and walked away down the street toward the brightly-lit entrance of the mall.

I think I rely too much on fate. If things are meant to happen, they will happen and there's no need to make any artificial moves or conscious efforts to interrupt the natural flow of events. Water over rocks, like the stalagmites inside Jeita Grotto. Fate be damned, I should start taking things into my own hands. “Nothing is written in the stars,” as the Elephant princess says in Wicked. Really? So there was nothing written in the stars about how I would encounter a mad paddle-wielding doughboy taxi driver in Beirut in the winter of 2008? Really nothing? Well, I guess I just got lucky then. I ought to thank my lucky stars.

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 2: Water

The next day (or was it the third day? I had delicious sushi-like eggplant rolls at a fancy French restaurant on Gemayzeh which was worth noting, sometime between Music Hall and Jeita), I decided to play the tourist game and visit some actual tourist sites in Lebanon. 

Let me tell you, I had huge plans to visit all the major sites in this country, from Beiteddine to Byblos to the Cedars and everything in between. What I didn't count on was falling sick, yet again! I was so angry at my weak immune system, which seems to have gone haywire ever since I came to the Middle East. Plus, it is freezing in Lebanon at this time of year, which I didn't count on, and for which I was not dressed enough, so it was kinda my fault for not wearing that extra layer, but I still decided to stew against my stupid immune system for not fighting the good fight with all the antibodies it must have stored up in the last two months. Anyway enough strange talk about stewing against sicknesses. 

Before I fell sick, I was able to visit at least a few of the touristy sites here, mainly the Jeita Grotto, the Harissa, and a Hall of Fame museum on the way to the Grotto. And I had an excellent grandfatherly taxi driver named Hazh to accompany me throughout the entire day trip. I was really touched when he went back to his car to pull out an umbrella when it started raining, and held it over my head to protect me from the light drizzle. He was like the grandfather I never had (both of mine, as well as one grandmother died before I was born).

It was Hazh's idea to take me to the Hall of Fame- a very cool idea for a museum. I saw realistic dummies of all these famous figures from the Arabic author Naguib Mahfouz and Van Gogh to world political figures like Clinton (first name Bill) and Bush and Kofi Annan and the Iraqi Minister of Media and Communications and Saddam Hussein, as well as some Arabic musicians and even my friend Einstein was there, looking rather frazzled.

And also the tallest, shortest, and fattest man in the world. The Clinton dummy kept saying over and over again, “I did not have sex with...[that chick in the black beret whom I totally fucked on more than one occasion]”, and the Bush dummy was doing that side-to-side shifty eye thing that Dubya does in real life (perhaps they''ve added a ducking motion by now). The shortest man was less than 2 feet tall and married a regular-sized woman and bore many children, apparently. And according to the tour guide, Einstein was known for taking like 2 showers a year...is that really true? I know he was known for never wearing socks, but the shower thing? And gee, I don't think I could ever marry a 1.5-foot man and have babies with him, so that was pretty crazy to find out.

...................

Water is deceptively simple. After the Hall of Fame, I visited the Jeita Grotto* next- a cave divided into an upper and lower section. The Upper Grotto was just pure limestone- thousands of masses of limestone in surprisingly complex shapes for something that was carved by water alone. While meandering slowly through the cave, so dim and humid, I saw a frog on a lilypad, a little girl in the act of waking, a 3-fingered hand that reminded me of Rodin's “Hand of God” which I'd seen three summers ago in Paris, and dozens of other sculptures, some more amorphous than others, all carved out by water dripping from the cracks in the cave's ceiling over thousands of years. To be precise, each centimeter of rock took 120 years to get carved out. Water, left to its own devices (and given lots of time) works in mysterious ways. 

It must have been really amazing for the discoverer of the grotto: To have move a regular pile of stones and discovered a hole; to have crawled through the hole, and found piles and piles of limestone in strange and beautiful shapes- stacks of rock that could easily be seen as just massive, unordered piles of rubble if not for the element of human imagination. I thought: how boring it must be to work as one of the guards stationed at various points of the cave's man-made path. But after one of them showed me the frog and the hand, I saw the more romantic aspect of his job- he sat here day after day for more than two years, giving shape and definition to these amorphous stacks, carvings, stalactites, stalagmites, and glittering limestone curtains, until he knew this particular patch of rock like the back of his hand (this analogy is used, assuming the back of one's hand is well-studied). It was a slower sort of discovery- like the way water shapes limestone- but full of surprises and secrets that he could then reveal to the odd tourist, like me. 

Towards the end of the path, I looked down the rail and saw at the bottom of the sheer drop a giant eye of the purest blue-green tint. Later, I would take a far-too-short boat ride across this pristine lake located in the Lower Grotto of the cave. The water was cool to the touch, and clear enough to see the sand at the bottom at the shallow ends. The ceiling hung low here and there with sharp dinosaur-teeth stalactites sticking out dangerously so that you had to duck quickly to avoid an undesirable skull-stabbing if your boatman was not a particularly careful driver and didn't do to much to warn you. The boat ride ended far sooner than I would have liked, and in minutes, I found myself once again standing at the entrance of the cave, shivering from the cold and watching the fine rain drizzle down lightly from under my red hood. Water was really deceptively simple.

And terrifying

z

Cold and austere

Pigeon Rock- natural rock formations set in the Mediterranean Sea along the waterfront.

*Unfortunately, cameras were not allowed in Jeita Grotto. I had to settle for mass-produced postcards, which granted, are probably of far better quality than any picture I would have taken in there.

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 1: Venturing Out of the Bomb Shelter

The night of my arrival in Beirut, Lebanon, I ventured into the Music Hall to check out the Lebanese “entertainment culture”. It's really lucky that I arrived in time to experience a Beirut weekend. Before I tell you about Music Hall, though, I want to tell you what it is like to be living for 4 months in Iraqi Kurdistan, and then suddenly finding myself walking through a street in Beirut, Lebanon after a couple short plane rides: frankly, it's like emerging from a bomb shelter to discover that the world is actually 50 years into the future, a la “Blast From the Past”, starring Brendan Frasier and Alicia Silverstone. As I walked wide-eyed through a street teeming with cars and people, though it was dark out, I was shocked by the sight of so many women dressed so scantily, elegantly, and fashionably. No demure covering to speak of around here! Nor neon-bright, tacky outfits, Santa dresses, or bumblebee outfits. Only short, stylish dresses, trendy jeans, checkered scarves, and fashion boots. And they all had beautiful, flowing dark brown hair and perfectly made-up faces. Geez, was this for real? I was positively dizzy from sensory overload. Don't laugh, but I actually took a picture of the entrance of a Hallmark store. It was so beautifully decorated for Christmas and the products inside were so adorable and beautiful and of such good quality! Sigh...I really spoiled myself silly during my stay in this country, but it was all totally and utterly worth it. You could say, I picked up the mindset of the Lebanese people (why save when you can spend?) with admirable ease and efficiency during my short stay there. And it all started with Music Hall...

Not really, but what a great transition that would have been! Before Music Hall, I spent the day walking through the city, whiled away time at a coffee shop (!) called De Prague, learned the difference between Iranian and Turkish rugs (one has geometrical designs, the other floral), and watched the tempestuous waves of the Mediterranean Sea seething and crashing against the rocks. I chatted for a long while with the young, friendly couple who owned an artisan crafts shop along the Corniche (the waterfront along the Mediterranean). They had lived in Seoul for six years during the '90s boom years, working for the Lebanese embassy there. They told me a funny story about how their son wouldn't stop crying one night, though they couldn't figure out for the life of them why. Finally after hours of trying everything they could think of, they called downstairs in the dead of night and asked for help from the Korean hotel receptionist, and figured out that all he wanted was rice. Only he was saying it in Korean- not in Arabic or French or even English. It was a story that was both funny and telling. The couple had moved back to Lebanon to raise their sons in a linguistically saner environment. (Only three languages to learn, not four.)

Later, I wandered through Gemayzeh street before it became a crazy party scene, and chatted with the youthful owner of a godfather-themed Italian restaurant there called Corleone Trattoria. He had become owner and manager of the successful business at the youthful age of 21 through sheer hard work. He was proud of his accomplishments, yet regretted not being able to enjoy his youth. He never had time to go out for dinners and drinks and parties like his peers because of his work. And yet, his restaurant was a beautiful success, set right in the heart of the Beirut party scene. This was not an unusual tale in Beirut, I realized later. Many Beirut-ers spend all their time working just to survive in their expensive city. Others work and spend, work and spend, and don't even try to save. It may be that they don't save for the future because their future might be bombed any day. The Lebanese live for the present and party like there's no tomorrow because, in fact, there may be no tomorrow.

I left Gemayzeh street eventually, and wandered through the beautiful downtown where stands a gorgeous mosque commissioned by the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. I toured the tent-memorial of Hariri, whiled away more time at the Apple Store there, flipping through artsy mac covers, whiled away even more time at the Virgin Records bookstore where I read through JK Rowlings latest book, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, and then finally made my way to Music Hall around 1 am, when the streets were still lit up and lively with weekend revelers. 

Though I was dressed ultra-casually in blue jeans and a hoodie  under my red coat and sneakers, I had no trouble getting into the concert hall because the party had started awhile ago,  maybe a couple hours ago, and they could tell I was a tourist. It was dark inside, and I remember red lights and then a huge audience seating area in front of the bar set in the back, as in a theatre. And a big stage below with a Reggatone band jamming away on it. It was very crowded with people dressed to the nines, all the women in elegant party dresses. People were seated in groups in red, semi-circular booths, eating fancy food, but others were on their feet dancing Lebo-style with their hands in the air to the music coming from the stage. This is what went on at Music Hall, every weekend. It's like a casual concert that you don't need tickets for in advance, that shows a dozen bands each night of a variety of music genres, accompanied by neon-bright roaming stage-lights; where people dine and drink and dance the night away. In between bands, they play recorded music and people dance to that too. House music is very popular, but they play and show all kinds- even a girl who did a remix of Stevie Wonder. The best part was at the end when an old man in his 60's with long silver hair came out with a stick and started dancing a jig of sorts and spinning his stick around like a ninja stick. This was Tony Hanna, a Lebanese musician beloved by his people, young and old, a symbolic figure, and clearly a crowd favorite. 

I didn't leave until around 3 or 4 that night, but there were still taxis around and cops stationed at street corners so it didn't feel weird or scary. Before going back into the Royal Garden hotel, I grabbed a cheese pizza from the pizza cart across the street that is open 24/7, and stood at the window of my 4th floor hotel room munching on it and watching the scene below. It was nothing interesting, but just the fact that there was something going on, that there was life on the streets at this hour of the night was enough to captivate my sorely-deprived senses. 

40% of the Lebanese population is Christian

Rafik Hariri's tent-memorial set in the shadows of the beautifully-lit mosque set in Downtown Beirut, commissioned by the late Prime Minister himself. He was assassinated in 2005 by a truck-bomb that blew up his entire motorcade. A cab driver drove me past the location of the bombing. "Hariri, BOOM!" he explained concisely.

The older crowd generally praised Hariri for the bottom-up post-war reconstruction of Beirut, while the younger crowd complained that he had sold half their nation to rich Saudis and brought Lebanon neck-deep into debt.

The cedar tree is the national symbol of Lebanon, growing abundantly in their snow-capped mountains.

Hariri's tomb. The white flowers are changed every few days. The wheel-shaped objects hanging on the walls and also covered with the same white flowers are a tribute from each of his children and grandchildren.

Hariri's bodyguards who were also killed in the 2005 truck-bomb assassination.

Music blared from speakers all the while; the flag of Lebanon marked with dozens and dozens of signatures.

I sat outside on the stoops of the mosque playing with my camera.

Ornate towers with octagonal balconies jutting up from the mosque.

Pretty lanterns

Music Hall

I climbed the Saint Nicholas Steps on Gemayzeh Street, beautifully lit for the holidays, lined with bars and restaurants, packed to the max on Saturday nights.

Along the Corniche (Waterfront) at sunset.

Un-posted Entries

I was looking through my old journal entries and discovered that I had never posted a bunch of entries I had written about my winter trip to Lebanon and Egypt. Here they are, with pictures. Verbose as always.

Where did Moses Go?

Epiphany:


There doesn't seem to be a well-formed concept of afterlife in the Jewish religion . How strange! I always assumed that a well-defined Heaven was one of the things that the three major monotheistic religions- and many others besides- had in common. 

Balls a-Flying

Almost four years ago, during my college years, I tried my hand at juggling with damaging failure. Eventually, I got tired of picking up balls from the grass, and so I cursed gravity and dropped the hobby instead.

Nearly four years later, this past June, the night before the first group of us teachers left Iraq for good, Tom put his juggling balls in my care. Oh the irony. What possessed me to keep them remains mysterious...perhaps something akin to nostalgia...but I kept them.

Then one day, about a month ago, I picked them up from their dust-gathering place in the bricked corner of my Freak Tent room in Philly, and I started juggling again. First one ball, then two, then I tried my hand at three.

I was as atrocious as ever, but this time I was a more perceptive learner. I learned how to throw, how not to throw, and most importantly, I paced myself. When I made it to 3 tosses in a row, then to 5, I congratulated myself and set a new goal of 6. A couple weeks passed in this fashion, my record number of tosses in a row never exceeding 8.

Then, sometime last week I hit the double digits- a record 12 tosses in a row! A couple days ago, when I hit a major stride and made it all the way to my age (25), I nearly choked my roomie Melissa with my exuberant hugging.

Today, I reached another important landmark, 42. I juggled the answer to the universal question! (The question itself remains mysterious.) I nearly crushed Sarah with my exuberant pummeling. Juggling turns me violent, it would seem.

The Return of Orion

After all the guests had gone, I remembered that there had been a spillage on the table on our rooftop. I went up armed with paper towels and windex to clean it up. It was freezing out, the biting air of winter approaching slowly but surely. When I looked up, I saw that the night sky was filled with stars, and it took my breath away. A starry sky was a rare sighting in Philadelphia. And there was Orion's Belt! It had followed me all the way back from Iraq, each of its extremities safely intact. Orion was like a constant celestial companion- returning every winter without fail, wherever I may be, ready to accompany me on my latest journey. 

I've been back in Philly for nearly four months now, and really life couldn't get any better. I live in a house that has a roofdeck with the most amazing view of the Philly skyline stretching from end to end. My bedroom is like a giant tent with rainbow curtains for walls and one built of brick, and I get to share it with Sarah. Preparations for grad school are in the works, and aside from that, I've been really delving into the arts since my return, taking dance classes with some amazing instructors and shooting around the city with my brand new DSLR camera.

And best of all, I now have a special earthly companion (who's also often got a twinkle in his eye but for a very different reason) who has made me feel rather like Jasmine when Aladdin takes her for a magic carpet ride. I never imagined I'd be able to relate to a Disney character. From him, I received my first bouquet of flowers- giant sunflowers blooming with fresh scents, spontaneity, and romantic intentions. And to hear about all the things that he's done makes me, in turn, dream bigger than ever. Dangerous, I know. But anyway, besides the grand stuff,

Earlier today, when I went to the neighborhood grocery to buy a drink, I saw pumpkins sitting on the shelf. I should make something with pumpkin for the potluck, I thought to myself. 'Tis the season, after all. But what could I make besides the usual pumpkin pie? Normally, I'd brainstorm for a bit, then head home to google pumpkin recipes, find one, go back to the store, get the rest of the ingredients, etc. But this time I picked up my phone and called Adam. 

"How about pumpkin dumplings?" he suggested.

You can make dumplings with pumpkin? Who knew? Well they turned out to be more like fried pieces of gnocchi than dumplings, and in fact, it was the only food at the party that turned out bad. But still, as I hung up the phone, I thought about how nice it was that I could just call someone instead of going it alone all the time.

Poe, Edgar

All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream.

I saw this line on a journal cover at Barnes today. It accompanied a mysterious, whimsical cover picture of a black (or silhouetted) cat pawing at a tree against a deep purple background. Sort of Halloween-ish. The line reminded me of the nursery tune Row, row, row your boat (...merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream!)

Here is the rest of the poem by Edgar Allan Poe (a Poet with a silent 't'):

I stand amid the roar 
Of a surf-tormented shore, 
And I hold within my hand 
Grains of the golden sand
How few! yet how they creep 
Through my fingers to the deep, 
While I weep - while I weep! 
O God! can I not grasp 
Them with a tighter clasp? 
O God! can I not save 
One from the pitiless wave? 
Is all that we see or seem 
But a dream within a dream?

Poor Edgar! Poe, Edgar!

The Sound of Language

I like how language turns into music when you don't understand it. That's how I found out my French was deteriorating, in fact. One day, I sat on the steps of Union Square in San Francisco listening to a French couple nearby chatting intimately in the language of windchimes and bells rather than defined words. 

...all the more melodious and rhythmic for their meaninglessness.

Coming to a Train Station Near You!

OH MY GOD, this clip makes me so happy! HAPPEEEEEE!!!!

Dear Diary, Today I...

It has been an interesting couple of days. Two days ago, I watched my first movie shoot. I was almost at Barnes on Rittenhouse, when someone stopped me from going further along the sidewalk. Turns out, they were shooting a scene for James L. Brooks' as-yet-untitled new film, a romantic comedy starring Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, and Owen Wilson, with Jack Nicholson as Rudd's father. I sat behind a glass door eating my veggie hoagie and watching Paul Rudd running through a crowd of perfectly-positioned extras in a posh-looking suit. 

I then watched as they set up for the next scene right in front of the awesome Comcast building. But as one of the crew-members said, it was like watching paint dry. Truly. I saw Paul Rudd sitting at a table in the outdoor restaurant, chewing gum like a cow while doing his real job- waiting. Seriously, “actors“ should actually be called “waiters“ because that's what they do 75% of the time. And seriously, no one can make gum-chewing look decent, not even the likes of a movie star. 

The next day, I had a good chat with one of my old linguistics professors at Penn. I remember for one class, we had to bring in a joke to analyze (that's academia for you), and so I brought in my strange-charm joke, a novelty back then- and he actually got it! I've always felt a sort of kinship with him since then. I ended up asking him lots of questions about how he got to where he is now- studying such recondite areas of knowledge such as the technicalities of little-known languages like Huave (an indigenous language of Mexico). Basically, he said it was intense curiosity and the desire to know the answers to questions that just kept multiplying the more he dug into the topic. 

The day after that, I went to my very first Argentine tango class, and had a blast. I think that's one of the things I missed most while I was abroad- the availability of dance classes. We had some great nights at the Edge, but that was for sure no replacement for a structured class where you learn new moves and routines. Tango was really interesting because you had to change partners often and I discovered that every partner is different. One partner will tell you you're stepping too long- even though she's 7 inches taller than you!-, and the very next partner will tell you you're stepping too short- even though she's 5 inches shorter than you! I swear, it happened exactly like that! Anyway, I figured in partner dancing, you just have to try to match with whoever you're dancing with. 

And let them lead you if you're the girl. I wasn't too keen on that at first because most of the leaders were not such great dancers themselves, so I had a hard time trying not to lead THEM. I didn't even realize I was trying to dominate until this nice grandpa dude was like “hold on, hold on, let ME lead YOU“. I was like “alRIGHT...“ all reluctantly, but actually, it went smoother after that with him at least because he was a decent guide. Thanks Grandpa.

Today, I spent 6 hours reading an academic paper at my new favorite cafe- Naked Chocolate Cafe on 13th in Walnut. Extremely cozy atmosphere and amazing-tasting solid AND liquid chocolates- although usually I just get a plain coffee because (a) it's the cheapest thing on the menu, and (b) it keeps me warm on these rather frigid beginning-of-autumn days.

In the evening, I rushed home in the rain to change, then ran in flip-flops in the rain to Koresh, where I took my first hip hop class in years, literally. It was freakin' hard, and I'll be the first to admit, I was one of the slowest ones in that class. She taught us a routine danced to “Ex-Girlfriend“ by Method Man & Wu-Tang Clan, a routine that was very heavy on the “you just have to get into the groove, na meen?“ moves. Which just made me wonder why it was that certain gestures you make look cool and others don't, even though they're both just equally abstract movements in the air. Anyway, I didn't have much time to wonder about that because it took every ounce of focus (and then more) to keep up with the class. Afterward, Sarah and I had a leisurely walk home in the dark, ground wet and shiny with rain.

This post is reminiscent of my very first diary entries, in which I would record the most mundane details of that day's activities in the simplest sentence structures. “Dear Diary, today I went swimming. It was fun. Then I did homework. Then I ate dinner. Then I played with my dolls...“ I never managed to keep a diary for long. 

Jersey Woods

Our campground in Jersey was a huge open field of neatly trimmed grass, surrounded by a circle of forest, and more campgrounds on the other side of the gravel path. We were a five minutes' drive from civilization. In the middle were four picnic tables plus a fire pit with stacked wooden planks for seating around the fire. The eight of us pitched our four tents as soon as we arrived, and proceeded to live out a most amazing weekend of uninhibited relaxation and ridiculous games, during which running around barefoot and neglecting hygienic duties became the norm. It's not something I could do for an extended period of time, but for 2 or 3 days, it's the most liberating experience ever. 

For two days, we drank, grilled manly meats and vegetable shishkebabs, played euchre and catchphrase, drew balls on passed-out victims like grade-schoolers, drank some more, played frisbee, had a dance-off to the choicest 90's techno and reggaetone music,...and so on. I adore Sarah's classmates from her BMB program because they're all so fun and interesting. I could go on and on about their distinct personalities, but I'll spare you. There is one, though, who was particularly fun to have on this trip. 

Matt is one of those people who will, when he's bored, think of the most random games, or else re-invent old ones. As soon as he arrived in the boys' car, he got out and started throwing his axe at a tree. It didn't take him long to figure out how to nail it consistently to the bark. Later, Sarah and I decided to give it a whirl, and I ended up nailing it six times. I won't say how many times I actually tried. Suffice it to say, 'twas enough for me to get six hits. And after doing a bunch of push-ups the night before the axe-throwing game, my right arm is seriously sore from the activity. 

On day two, we ventured into the woods to explore the sandy trails and gather firewood on the way back. We crossed a few shaky bridges and saw many different varieties of trees like holly and ones with serpent-like branches wrapping and curling around the main trunk. We came upon a lovely brown river (see, it wasn't blue!) that I wouldn't dare swim in, but still liked the look of it. On the way to the river, Yosh stopped me in the middle of my awesome rendition of “The Ants Go Marching One-By-One” (I was on five-sies. The last one stopped to eat-a-baked-potato-with-sour-cream-and-CHIVES)- 

“Shhh!” he hushed us. We all turned into stone (or pillars of salt, if you like), staring in the direction he was pointing in. It took me ages to see what he was seeing- a gorgeous, tan-colored deer with full-grown antlers staring at us from afar. I waved to it. It stared back with unblinking eyes. Then it bent its crowned head back down to continue eating, then quickly snapped its head back up as if it were only testing us. Eventually, it bounded off into the trees. We moved on and continued our expedition through mini-mounds crawling with daddy-long-legs, past blueberry bushes, and things of that nature. 

When we got back with the firewood, Matt and Yosh started tossing a frisbee around. Then Sarah joined them. I watched, envious of her frisbee-throwing skills (we are clearly not identical!). As the frisbee was spinning toward Sarah, Matt ran and intercepted it, and the game turned into Monkey-in-the-Middle. No more than a minute into this new game, he grabbed a 12-foot-long piece of firewood and started using that to block the frisbee. This game was called “The Stick”, the most ridiculous, most hilarious game to play and watch. I tried spinning with it randomly because I figured it was so long, it was bound to hit the frisbee along its path. Eventually, I got too dizzy and abandoned the stick entirely and proceeded to just tackle people for the frisbee, which was more manageable than using the ridiculously long and unwieldy Stick. 

A new drink was invented, called the Heartburn shot: Hershey's chocolate syrup + sriracha sauce, squirted directly in the mouth, chased down with a shot of vodka. It was a violent unification of contradictory flavors that somehow came out tasting good. The whole was for sure more than the sum of its parts.

Later, long after the sun went down, we teepee-ed a bunch of really long firewood and built a bonfire whose flames reached higher than 5-foot-11 (the height of the tallest person in our group). It was so impressive a fire that the eight of us simply sat or stood around it, magically silenced, watching in reverence as its light orange flames flickered and roared soundlessly, being pulled this way and that by the rather strong winds that blew that night. We watched the flames licking the logs, the logs burning and smoldering, glowing like blacksmiths' iron as the flames surrounded them and seeped through them, a fiery spirit mercilessly invading souls, flames flaring up through the cracks in the old, dead bark. We watched as a strike with the axe sent a million sparks flying, like a swarm of brilliant, horny fireflies raining skyward, and disappearing suddenly into the dense, inescapable dark. The teepee-ed logs, too hastily arranged, soon collapsed sideways like an immobilized troll, lighting a stray shoe on fire. 

It had been cloudy all the second day, and so we were expecting that the moon wouldn't be able to light up the sky for us like it had the first night. How wrong we were. That night, the full moon rose higher and higher in the sky, its strong, bright light creating the illusion of a hole in the clouds that passed under it, so that even though the clouds were moving quickly and thickly across the sky, we always had a full view of the moon through that gap right around it. After Yosh set up his blanket and “tortilla wrap”  (sleeping bag) on the dewy grass, right beneath this open sky and full moon, Matt, Devin and I raided it promptly. The others had fallen asleep in their chairs around the dying fire, heads hanging comically low, or else had made it to a tent before passing out. 

The four of us lay on the blanket, watching smoky clouds moving swiftly and continuously past our lone satellite, and clearing up here and there to reveal a smattering of stars- more than I've seen in a while. Whenever I see clouds moving past the moon, my brain always interprets it falsely as the moon moving against a still sky, so I always have to take a minute to adjust the perception. Adjust and stare. Not a bad view for Jersey, the supposed Armpit of the United States. Crickets and who knows what other creatures buzzed all around us. The night is never quite silent. I learned this fact the night I slept on a bench on the banks of the Cher River in France, back in 2005. Such a cacophony of noise I had never heard before, including creepy dolphin cries, Sincerely! 

The fields in Jersey are much quieter, though. Someone remarked that the celestial movements looked like CGI. My eyes followed the treetops that formed the periphery of the expansive circle of sky above us. The border of treetops curved around and down toward my feet and then I couldn't follow it anymore. I raised my head to see where it led, and saw instead, the silhouette of a giant walnut tree, its inky branches hung with walnut bulbs and leaves, and curving and angling upward into the navy sky, unable to reach the moonlight. 

Lyrical Moment in 21 Grams

I heard the beginning of this in the movie, 21 grams, and had to look up the rest. Here it is: 

The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer

   by Eugenio Montejo

   translated by Peter Boyle

The earth turned to bring us closer,

it spun on itself and within us,

and finally joined us together in this dream

as written in the Symposium.

Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices;

time passed in minutes and millennia.

An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh

arrived in Nebraska.

A rooster was singing some distance from the world,

in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers.

The earth was spinning with its music

carrying us on board;

it didn't stop turning a single moment

as if so much love, so much that's miraculous

was only an adagio written long ago

in the Symposium's score.

Camping in Jersey tomorrow! Tents, peanut butter & jelly, beer, and no showers for 2 days- oh, and there may, or may not, be an accordion involved. Life can only get so much better! This too was written in the Symposium's score.

Bethany Beach

Delaware's not so bad. I've been sponging off of Sarah's friends since I haven't been back in Philly long enough to form my own bonds. Thanks to that, I got to go to a beach in Delaware and experience this:

Angled bridge

Lit like a spotlight onstage

by fluourescent white lights swarming with flies.

On either side, wild grasses grew

from white sands.

Lit unnaturally

by white fluourescent lamps

I tread the angled bridge in flat silver shoes,

stopped.

& lost my breath, my eyes grew wide.

Never have I seen 

such blackness staring me down.

It stretched across the dimensions

ready to swallow me whole

into its deep, dark, infinite abyss

Empty space, 

neglected by the Creator of things

I tread the length of the angled bridge

approaching the abyss.

Kicked off the silver shoes

and walked straight into the abyss.

I was not afraid. I knew the nothingness

was only an illusion. 

Things were there, should light be cast on them.

Just now, the light was fast asleep.

As all should be, 

but not were we.

Bare feet

Soft sands beneath the toes, 

Grains between the toes

We paused at the edge of the dry sands

& the beginning of the wet sands

From here, the abyss

was no longer empty.

We heard the woosh and crash of 

the surf against the shore

It thrilled me! Electrified me!

Leaving the others behind, my bare feet took off running down the wet sands

Hands flurried to strip off the remaining flowing garments

Tumbled playfully in the sands along the way

and dove into the abyss

Cold, black Atlantic! 

Pale bodies floating in a sea of tar

Above us another sea of tar

speckled with stars, 

no moon 

only Venus and Mars

I try to surf with the tide incoming

Massive, mammoth monster rising

But black force pounds my face and engulfs all my senses drowning

My sight is struck with stars

Thunder crashes around my ears

I lose all sense of when or where

As ruthless waves toss me hither and there

My clothes are ripped askew

All I can do is gasp and sputter

and crawl on my knees,

dragging my self, beaten and stripped, to the kinder shore.

Woah, rush! Again and again, over and under,

I battle with the tides over and over

What a rush, What a rush, the need to suffer...and fight and conquer

Back to shore I drag my self 

through the heavy molasses I drag my self

Bare feet back on solid sand 

and light and slender air

I become a spectator as others battle

their own tempestuous waves

On this planet, I see

no colors but black and white

Black sea, white crests

Black sky, white sands

Pale luminous torsos glow

like stars fallen into the jet-black flow

Crests race in from sea to shore like 

white stallions in battle form

Two front lines charge toward the shore 

Diagonal lines close in and roar

Clash and explode.

Another races from side to side

I watch, hypnotized.

I think we are standing at the edge 

of a strange planet

One jump will take us into deep space

off this strange planet

But I know this place, this lonely planet

And feel no desire to abandon it

Why would I want to leave?

Why would I want anything better?

We are here, and we don't know it

We are home, and we don't know it

Know it, know it, seek it, love it!

And then abandon it.

Mind vs. Eye

I went running for an hour yesterday! We ran along the Schuylkill River all the way to Boathouse Row and back to our house, and I'll be damned if it wasn't the most beautiful day ever, with so many other runners along the same route, which is inspiring...and perspiring.

When we reached the still waters of the beginning of Boathouse Row, where the canoes floated idly against the dock and the trees reflected their mossy green in the shaded water, two things happened. One, I was struck by the beauty and tranquility of the scene, so like an impressionist painting. This is as beautiful as it gets in gritty Philadelphia.

And two, it occurred to me suddenly that water is not supposed to be clean. In imagination, I always picture natural bodies of water to be blue and clear, but in real life, I am always unpleasantly surprised by how green or brown and unclear they are. The Schuylkill in Philly is always bashed for its mysteriously murky, hazardous-looking water, supposedly full of dead bodies; and the waters of Greenlake in Seattle reflect its name due to the excessive growth of algae and milfoil underneath its calm surface; and the Nile and Tigris, both acclaimed rivers in ancient times, but when you actually see them, you can't help but cringe at the thought of stepping foot into their murky depths. But maybe that's how natural bodies of water should be and the fault is really with my idealization of rivers and lakes.

We probably do this more than we realize- kind of like how we draw stars with 5 triangle points, but in reality, stars look nothing like that. Or how we often draw sheep as these fluffy, cloud-like things, but in reality, sheep hair is long, straight, and mangy and not white. Sigh...I always suffer such disappointment whenever I run across a real sheep! They are not at all like the cute and fluffy sheep you see in cartoons. Mental and physical representations probably rarely ever match up with the real object it represents. But that's ok because representations don't necessarily have to be accurate, right?

Presenting...The Kurdistan Project

For the past couple weeks, I've spent my waking hours working on a way to present my photos from the past year abroad. Half the time was spent organizing the photos into slideshows on iPhoto, the other half was spent linking the slideshows together and adding effects ("FX") on iMovie. Thank God for my Macbook. I wish the quality of the pictures was better at Full Screen mode. Pix-el-a-ted. Oh well. Here's the end product, parsed into 10 parts because there's no site that uploads videos that are almost an hour-and-a-half long (damn, I took a lot of pictures), and posted through my brand new youtube account! Wish I could be there to narrate for you.

Screw it, I'm putting them all on Blogger because (a) smaller size = better quality & (b) no annoying audio restrictions.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Part 6:

Part 7:

Part 8:

Part 9:

Part 10:

Mystery Phone Call

The other day, I was woken up by a phone call way too early in the morning. The number on the phone began with 964 and looked ridiculously long. I opened the phone anyway.

“Hello?”

“Hello?” replied a little girl's voice. 

Who the hell was this? My girlfriends tend to be in their twenties or older, not ten.

“Hello? (*Major static*) Miss Angie?

Oh my, it's been a while since I've heard that name! 

“Miss Angie, this is Abdulrahman.” 

It wasn't a little girl! It was one of my kindergarden boys calling me from Iraq! And his English was rockin'. Go Abo!

Good Timing

I think I left just in time. The location of the latest bombing was uncomfortably close to Erbil, and right in the region of that Syriac monastery we visited a few months ago. Timing is everything!

Final Citadel Survey: Muddy Waters

June 20, 2009

I shut the cab door and turned around. Facing the inside of the bazaar, suddenly, I felt like exploring, not shopping. Good thing there was an ancient citadel right across the street! I made a detour from bazaar to citadel, bought a couple of those shepherd bags from the tapestry shop underneath, and headed through the archway and up the stairs for what would be the last time, though at the time, I was thinking I'd be coming here at least a couple more times before leaving. As usual, there were a couple lone men perched on the edge of the flat top overlooking the city, watching the hubbub of the bazaar traffic below. The sky that day was a uniform, hazy white, so heavy with dust that the buildings along the horizon appeared smoky and gray. 

I entered through an opening on the side this time. Fortress walls enclosed the path on either side and reached up to the sky. Treading this path, I came upon an old mud-brick wall in a permanent state of crumbling. Staring up at it, I realized it was not just a single wall, but layers upon layers of it. Underneath the crumbling parts, older layers of wall could be seen, as well as old doors and windows that had been built then blocked up later on. Some patches of brick were smoother than others. Some patches looked like old man's teeth, all crooked and leaving gaps and halfway pulled out. Bricks grew out in clumps from flatter surfaces like the mossy growth on ancient tree trunks. I couldn't believe it was still standing because it looked like a Jenga game that's been going on much too long.

I meandered like one of the citadel cats through some alleys with my camera, until I saw one of the guards walking toward me. I nodded agreeably as he gave me the usual friendly warning to not stray from the main road, and dutifully followed him back. About a dozen or so members of the pershmerga lounged around the circular podium there in their army pants, but as soon as they saw me approaching, their leader barked at them to get into formation and they started doing these hilariously lame, outdated exercises. I managed to get a picture of them while they were still lounging around. 

Looking up from the picture, I noticed an ever-so slight brownish tint of the sky that had not been there earlier. Dust was gathering. It hit me then just how brown everything in here was today. The mud-brick buildings, the dirt ground, and now even the sky was reflecting an off-white tint.  

I made my way up the main road toward the other archway in the back of the citadel, pausing to take photos of an adorable Creamsicle-colored cat lurking at the top of a railed staircase behind some old bricks and leaves. Seriously, it is the cats that rule this place now. Akkadians, Babylonians, Persians and Greeks have come and gone, and now only the felines remain. 

By the time I passed under the back archway, the dust had thickened so much the sky seemed to be dropping down on the city, the smoky film along the horizon having spread forward to turn the clear outlines of distant buildings into indiscernible shadows shrouded in mist.

I climbed up some old crumbling staircase along the right side of the citadel walls, over loose boards, stones, and mounds of dirt. There was supposed to be an amazing view of the city during sunset from a window up here somewhere. But even as I began climbing, I could see a guard out of the corner of my eye making his way toward me. Argh, since when have they become so annoyingly thoughtful of the tourists' safety? I sat down on a cement block and pulled out my camera, indicating to the guard that I was just going to sit here taking pictures. He seemed to be fine with that, though he lingered to keep watch. I'll come back another day and try to get up there, I thought. Of course that day never came.

Perched on the cement block and leaning against the old mud-brick wall, I watched as this one came to an end, the sun sinking slowly down from its lofty roost. Its gold light cast a yellowish hue over the westerly sky, diffused by the intense dust clogging the atmosphere that day. The entire sky seemed to glow with a soft, nebulous light.  Strong gusts of wind blew that infernal dust my way. I shielded my eyes with my hands, and futilely tried to brush my bangs away against the direction of the wind. The winds were shifting, the air hung heavy. Gee, the day sure felt ominous. I toyed with my camera for awhile until suddenly, a fat raindrop splattered on it, and I looked up to see that the world had been drenched in coffee. 

Or so it seemed. Brown, brown, everywhere brown! Muddy brown skies hovered over a muddy brown city with brown buildings and white buildings that looked yellowish-brown under the strange glowing light from above. I was impressed, but also, I had to get out of the rain that was about to be unleashed. 

I ran down and took shelter underneath the arch next to a young girl about 12 years of age, but already as tall as me. Possibly, I have not grown since I was twelve. We huddled against the bricks and watched the muddy rain drumming down, heavy as pebbles. 

Soon, though, the wind was sweeping the downpour sideways, so we were getting wet anyway. A soldier motioned for us to get inside the old security station. Grateful for the tiny, but dry shelter, we sat down on the old stone bench and sighed with relief- but I yelped and leapt up a second later because water was dripping down from the ceiling onto the bench where I sat. So we stood side-by-side, waiting for the storm to pass. 

The girl's name was Raman, and she was visiting from Denmark with her grandfather. Raman dreamed of living in Kurdistan forever. The houses here were big and beautiful, she said, and nowhere else has she ever seen such beautiful things. I liked how she could say these things about her homeland even in the midst of a giant, disgusting mudstorm. A shattered window directly in front of me framed an old man standing under the eaves of a house across the dirt path, one hand resting on a large, yellow garbage bin, the other wiping the rain off his balding head. The old man was her grandfather, a school headmaster. The rain slashed down like needles past this viewing frame. 

We watched the river of coffee flow and splatter past the doorless entrance. It reminded me of a time more than a dozen years ago, when I stood under the protective eaves of a storefront somewhere along the route to my aunt's house in Korea, watching a muddy river rushing madly by through the cobblestone street. Now that was a rainstorm. I had been exactly Raman's age, but unlike her, I remember being scared stiff by the torrential flood that looked like it could easily sweep me away if I tried to step into it to get home. All I wanted, though, was to get home, so I braved the torrents and blindly made my way back to my aunt's house eventually. I remember my lovely aunt yelled at me for not taking an umbrella. Hmph. As if an umbrella could have held back a rushing river. She must have been mistaking me for Moses.

This time, I waited. Quite suddenly, the downpour slowed to a trickle, then stopped completely. We stepped out of our tiny cement shelter, amazed at the transformation. Having dumped all its dirt onto the city below, which remained a murky, muddy brown, the sky looked positively cheery: light and clear and fluffy with clouds. Had it been a cartoon, it would have started whistling a tune. Had it been a deer, it would have started frolicking after a butterfly. How beguiling. Raman and I joined her grandfather and the few other tourists heading down the hill and out the citadel. Her grandfather invited me to their home, so I waited with them in the flooded streets for a cab, taking care to step upon the more solid islands of mud. The sun had sunk low and was glowing a pale orange, visible just over an old brick wall across the street. I followed them into the cab for an evening of ice cream and babies at Raman's aunt's house. 

“If I had all the money and time in the world...” We ended up playing this game somehow. Raman said she would live in Kurdistan and help other people. Wait till she finds out just how many ways there are of doing that. How would she choose? Her younger sister would be a princess. Would that be a full-time occupation? I guess in this day and age, depending on which realm you're in charge of, being a princess might entail getting involved in politics on top of wearing the tiara and pretty dresses. In the old days in Kurdistan, a princess was also a warrior (Remember Princess Khanzad, the 12th century Kurdish warrior princess? The Yezedis, before the Islamic conquest, did not care much for distinct gender roles.). Her older cousin was studying to become a civil engineer, which sounds a lot less glamorous than Occupation: Princess, but in a developing region like Kurdistan, would be a hundred times more useful. 

In the corner of the room, swaddled in blankets, the littlest sister, still just a baby, cried out in her sleep. I wondered what dreams had startled her from her tranquil slumber. 

Four Squares & 16 Years Ago...

Barnes closes way too early! Who goes to bed at 10 pm! Especially when the weather is as perfect as it was yesterday. I left the bookstore at closing time, crossed the street to go home, but could not stand the idea of wasting away this beautiful warm-but-not-muggy evening indoors, so I cut through Rittenhouse Park, found a bench, and opened my new book. 

Not even a page in, however, cheers and claps filled the air. I looked up from my book toward the source of the clamor and saw a bunch of people gathered in the center of the park. Curious, I gathered up my belongings and approached the crowd. It seemed they were gathered in a circular formation. I saw a ball bouncing around. Then I saw four people standing in the middle of the circle. Have you guessed it? They were playing Four Square! That great childhood game we used to play every day during recess (if not Chinese jumprope or kickball), with all those silly rules like Cherrybomb and Zap and Tea Party, and there was always that one girl named Sari who would cherrybomb everyone out as soon as they got in the game, damn her! That was 16 years ago...

Now, at a park in Philly 16 years later, I watched as they continued the game, bouncing the ball around 4 squares naturally formed by the pattern on the ground. They were playing the bare-bones version of the game, with no Cherrybombs, hurray, so I got in line to play. The crowd of players was made up of young people, from late-teens to early twenties, a rather punkish-looking and hipster crowd, a good-natured lot. A thin, pale-skinned girl with jet black hair and dark make-up around her eyes crouched above the scene, on the stone ledge, taking pictures with a fancy SLR camera, herself making quite the Kodak moment with the clock tower glowing brightly in the sky above her through the trees. I asked the person ahead of me in line about the game, and found out they gathered here every Monday and Wednesday evening to play. 

“Who brought the ball?” 

He shrugged. Most of them seemed to be regulars. They cheered me in as a new member when my turn came around. I actually made it to the third square! Hey, accidents happen. I got out on the first square the next two times, then made it to the third square again the last time. What a great game! Now, all we need is a chinese jumprope revival at Rittenhouse Park, and the regression would be complete. 

Streets of Philadelphia

Every day, I look forward to my walk from West Philly into Center City, even in the extreme humidity. There are so many things to see along the way- interesting shop displays, art gallery displays, all these restaurants and bars I have yet to try. Lately, I've been noticing all these architectural elements like different types of columns and pilasters and recurring types of wrought-iron curlicues (okay “arabesques”) like the basic kidney bean shape, or the S shape, and of course the violins. Today, on 20th street alone, I saw a stone Buddha statue with its typical curved lines, and a giant painted leopard statue posed on someone's front stoops with its front paws up in midair, about to either claw the door or ring the doorbell. Gombrich (author of “The Story of Art”) has opened my eyes; art is everywhere! Waiting to be noticed. Also, it took centuries of evolution in art for that Doric column to get there to support that storefront in Philly.

In the early evening, while perched on a bench in Rittenhouse Park, I witnessed a fight break out between two homeless men right in front of me. One went away and came back with a bottle of white wine, smashed it on the curb, and held the sharktooth-rimmed top half in the air, threatening to smash it over his opponent's head, and the other guy pulled out his bike-lock chain in response, stretched it out and threatened to whip his opponent with it. Both swore they'd get the other. Both walked away in the end without shedding blood or breaking bones. I didn't know whether to be relieved or call them cowards.

In the beginning of the fight, I was highly disturbed. By the middle of the fight, I was shaking my head and nearly laughing to myself at the “crazy folk” of Rittenhouse Park. But before the laughter could escape my lips, I suddenly remembered feeling angry enough to want to hurt someone before, recently, and I realized that no matter how crazy or how young the person is, their feelings of hurt and anger are real. The fight had suddenly lost its humor. I suddenly hated how everyone around it was either laughing like it was a big show (though it was pretty damn funny when the little dog decided to join the fray and started barking at both of them), or exchanging condescending, "crazy bums; sure glad I ain't one of them" looks with each other. By the end of the fight, I just felt incredibly sad that a beautiful day like this, that a beautiful place like this could hold such ugliness.

I took the 18th street route to go home tonight and saw a most beautiful moonrise circled by a wreath of leaves perfectly situated, as if the trees which bore the leaves were nurtured and placed there for the sole purpose of framing the half-moon on July 30, 2009 at 10 pm. It made me think of Ray Charles crooning “just as sweet and clear/as moonlight through the pines.” Tonight, though, the moonlight was not so clear- hazy with cloud cover- but the dimming effect of the clouds made it appear all the more mysterious, its light diffuse and dreamlike. Across the narrow street stood the gothic-style temple lit like a jack-o-lantern from within so that its stained glass windows refracted light in vivid cobalt, emerald, and ruby red. They looked like enormous Turkish lanterns melded into the shadowy stone blocks of the temple. The ruby red window, speckled with bits of orange and yellow, towered next to the framing trees in the night sky, adding the perfect touch of ornamentation to the wreathed moon. I had to stop and take a picture with my “mind camera”. My “memera” I should call it. Hm, but that sounds disease-related...

Laughing Out Loud

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/opinion/28benn.html?em)

I read the above article from the Times today, and laughed out loud when I realized that Obama's reticence toward the Israel problem, which the author discusses in the article, is not-so-vaguely reminiscent of the way I ran out on my parents last month. For years, I've tried and tried with all sorts of tactics like encouragement and endless advice to solve my parent's marriage problems, just as the US made the Israel-Palestine conflict a lead issue, no matter who was in the Oval Office, lavishing attention on it and so outwardly determined to improve the situation within the presidential term. Now, the office has changed hands once more and according to the author, Obama is virtually ignoring it, just as I recently decided that enough was enough; that too much attention and sympathizing and understanding had made the problem worse rather than better.

I don't claim that this tactic of ignoring is the best way to go about solving my own personal problem, let alone an international, poliical one- nor do I claim that Obama is purposefully using such a tactic, which is only suggested by the author. But I will say that it is something new, a change from the old way, which clearly was not working. I would make a terrible President. Presidents can't scream at their relations to grow up, stop acting like children and stop fucking other women. Presidents can't call their relations insane even if they are North Korea and damn well crazy. It ain't easy being President.

I also read a beautifully-illustrated picture book called "Cat Heaven", and laughed out loud when I reached the part that says that in Cat Heaven, the cats sit on "God's kitchen counter" where there are many cat dishes full of sardines and tuna for the cats to chow down to their hearts' content. My first thought was, If this was Cat Heaven, then was it also Fish Hell? Also, if a Fish Hell exists, would a Fish Heaven also exist in which the Fish are on the other side of the bowl watching humans swim around mindlessly and blow bubbles, unable to escape the cramped confines of the aquarium? So many possibilities exist with a healthy dose of imagination!

Reflecting on Reflections

“...And so, the image of the object is seen as being behind the mirror.”

It is?

I always thought of my reflection as being on the surface of the mirror, not behind it. Obviously, nothing lies behind the mirror. Or so I thought. I guess I didn't know what I was supposed to think. Now, thanks to sitting in on an intro physics class, I know that I'm supposed to think that my reflection is behind the mirror, because that's what my eye sees. And what my eye sees, my mind must see, I guess, is the assumption. I think this is where screws become loose in some heads, when there's a huge discrepancy between the eye and the mind. So now, in order to show I'm not crazy, I'm going to try to make myself believe my reflection is behind the mirror every single morning.

Schooooool's Out For Summer!

June 19, 2009

Schoooool's out forEVER!

The last day of school called for a lot of hugs. Regardless of what day it is, though, 5-year-olds have an inherent hugging impulse, as if it is in their nature to love. I think the hug control center is located somewhere near the thymus, but the impulse remains virtually uncontrollable until kids reach the age of 7 or 8. Until then, all they can do is helplessly follow their arms as they desire to wrap themselves around some warm-blooded target standing around in the same room.

Of course, by high school and university, to have such a compulsion to hug your teacher during class is far from endearing- and rather a symptom of some psychological instability. Sometimes, when I observe my younger kids, it occurs to me how such alien yet adorable behavior would be considered repulsive in an adult, and usually a sign of mental retardation. This double standard is disquieting. Teaching such young kids has made me realize just how much is lost in the inevitable process of growing up. Unconditional love to the point of idolization, unsuppressed displays of affection, laughter that brightens the entire face with utter delight, playfulness and boundless energy, endless curiosity and wonder at the smallest things...and half of these things are lost in school, where they are trained to sit still and be quiet and not interrupt class with hugs. But admittedly, it is sensible and necessary to learn to lose some of these childish behaviors in order to train the mind, function in group settings, blah blah blah, and most importantly, so that they don't drive their teachers crazy.

Speaking of which...Before I knew it, the bus kids were gone, and I was left in the dirty, cluttered classroom with the remaining kids running around and chasing and hitting each other as usual. By this time, though, I usually allow them to be kids again.

“Miss Angie! Diyar and Tara are hitting me!” Daryan came to me complaining while my brain was still trying to comprehend that it was almost over.

“Diyar, Tara, you can hit each other, but stop bothering Daryan.”

Diyar and Tara grinned at each other and turned their (harmless) weapons on each other instead of Daryan. Crisis easily averted. It hit me as I was standing around, that I'd never see the bus kids again, and suddenly the last high-fives and goodbyes I gave as they filed out the door weren't enough. I regretted not taking one last long look at little Shene's face, or picking up Hoz and tickling the little puppy one last time, or...damn, but these moments pass too quickly! So many things were going on at that moment that I just treated it as just an end to yet another school day, and suddenly they were gone. I scooped up Zerin and smothered her with kisses before handing her to her sister, and Bariz the Panda threw himself at me one last painful (he's a hefty kid) time before heading out with his driver.

Goodbye, my babies! Qua xafis, darnafis (”See you later, alligator”)!

Playing Games & The Sounds of Laughter

June 16, 2009

It always startles me when Doe acts like the 5-year-old girl that she really is. She is so perspicacious for her age that I often forget she's still just a baby. If you think you can't use logic with a 5-year-old, you haven't met Doe. She may ask “why”, but once you explain why, she takes a minute to intently process what you said, and most of the time comes to an understanding, or at the very least acceptance and continual musing.

The school year is coming to a close, and these last few days have been more fun-filled. Since all our work is finished, I have been spending a lot of class time teaching the kids how to play games like “Find the bell”, Hangman, and “Rock, Paper, Scissors”. This last one is a huge hit with the kids, and they've actually modified this timeless game to include things like “Pencil”, which beats Paper by writing on it. Out on the playground, someone suggested “Snake”, and Doe, ever the innovator said,

“Let's every time we both do snake, you kiss me and I kiss you!”

I was confused at first, but I just went with the flow, letting her teach me: “Rock, Paper, Snake! Rock, Paper, Snake!”, until we both did Snake with our index fingers pointing outward. Then Doe touched her index finger to mine and made silly kissing noises. As soon as I understood, I make equally silly kissing noises back and suddenly, Doe gave a most childish, gleeful squeal, and it was one of those moments that reminded me of how young she really was still. The sound of her laughter is unbelievably disarming- so full of delight.

Hoz also has a laughter that is incredibly disarming, but in a different way: more like an explosion . When he laughs, his entire countenance brightens like a sunburst. And it takes so little to make him laugh. Once I was standing at the board teaching, and suddenly I looked down and saw him crouched down into a tiny little ball right at my feet, waiting gleefully for me to notice. As soon as I made a surprise face, he burst out into his radiant laughter and ran back to his chair. And then I went on teaching.

Sometimes, teaching five-year-olds feels like teaching in an alternate Alice-in-Wonderland universe.

At the time, I remember thinking, it takes so little to entertain them! A silly expression on my face and they'll laugh like it's the funniest thing in the world! I had them wrapped around my little finger! I thought naively. Now I realize, that actually, they've got me wrapped around their tiny little fingers. Hoz was the one crouching down and hiding to make me laugh; Doe was the one to coax me into playing Rock, Paper, Scissors and making me laugh with her innovations. They were teasing me! Hm, I suddenly feel the fool, but blissfully so.

Before I taught KG, I was somewhat fearful that working with kids this little all day would “dumb me down”. Interacting at such basic levels, how could it not? In reality, though, working with kids so young has brushed off the dust and rust from worldly things, restoring them to the original level of wondrous and strange and new.

But it is a love-hate relationship. I love them, but containing the energy of dozens of kids at once and simultaneously trying to teach them is mentally and physically draining. I love them, and I'll miss them horribly, but I'm not altogether sorry to see it end. Like most endings, this one will be bittersweet. But more on the sweet end. I'm pretty certain I'll be skipping ten feet in the air down the walkway lined with toilet watered mulberry trees for what will be the very last time.

Zerindoodoo

June 9, 2009

Zerin is back! She and her entire family's been stuck in London with a visa re-entry problem since the end of March, and boy have I missed this doll! She's a little one- so tiny, she weighs about the same as a one-year-old baby, and her tiny hand can barely hold one of our fat wooden pencils. As frustrating as it was to be her teacher, I've missed the way she stares dreamily at me from her seat, a pencil in one hand, lifeless and un-writing, her chin in the other, her huge almond-shaped eyes vacant as a parking lot after closing hour, a thin fountain of hair springing from the top of her tiny head. Academically, she was in deep doodoo, having missed so much of the last term, but it's good to have her back with us.

Mr. Clarry's Clues: Assyrian Rock Carvings in Khanis

June 6, 2009

The nearly-full moon nestled between the criss-cross of the wires strung over my head, I lay on the stone block in the middle of the rooftop, blanketless, but swaddled in the balmy night air. We were at a party in the USAID compound, but my eyes were closing to the sounds of mingling and music and laughter coming from the party below. I think I was really tired out from our second failed attempt at reaching Lalish, the Yezedi temples up north. We only got as far as the Assyrian rock carvings in Khanis before the driver started demanding more money than what we had bargained for.

Instead of giving in to his deceit, the three of us got out of the cab and joining the locals picnicking along the canal's edge. A Yezedi family on their way back from their annual pilgrimage to the temples invited us for tea and lunch. Once again, I was overwhelmed by the generosity displayed toward perfect strangers. After eating and drinking, I watched and took pictures as men, women and children waded in the dirty brown and green water, fully-clothed (with the exception of two stark-naked little boys). On the other side of the canal, T joined the Kurds, ducking under the rocks and getting baptized by the water streaming down off the rocky ledge. What a strange sight, all in all. I guess bathing suits or clean water aren't all that necessary for swimming after all, as we Westerners are led to believe.

*PS: We never made it to Lalish. It was not meant to be.

Iraqi Karaoke

June 4, 2009

At around half-past ten in the evening, B, T, and I were heading down to the big gym to shoot some hoops. After an attempt at breaking in- a very valiant attempt, I might add, in which I rolled on my side through a narrow window, wandered through the boys' locker room, and out into the dark corridor, only to find that the door to the basketball gym was locked without window-access- I climbed back out and stood around with the others, waiting for someone to come down with the keys. That's when we heard the music that altered the course of our evening. B, not feeling so spontaneous stayed behind to shoot hoops while T and I followed the music down the hill, past the un-manned security gate, across the highway, and into the gravel front lot of the giant glass-tiered house.

“Okay, so how are we going to do this?” T asked.

“Easy: just walk by and stare until they stare back. Then smile and wave to break the ice, then they'll smile and wave, and badda-bing! We're in.”

And that's pretty much exactly how it happened.

They ushered us into the garden to a table in the back. It was like stepping into one of the 1001 Tales from the Arabian Nights. At a long banquet table facing the stage sat the other guests- about a dozen middle-aged fat, bald, Kurdish men in button-down shirts wrapped tightly around their substantial bellies. On the stage stood a lone man singing a lively Kurdish tune with only a keyboardist as accompaniment. The men listened and clapped and cheered and sometimes stood up to dance. Plates of salad and hummus and bottles of imported beers lay on the table, half-eaten, half-drunk. Waiters went around serving plates piled high with chicken tikkas, lamb kebabs, liver even, all covered with giant pieces of flatbread. I sat back with my own beer, watching the moths fluttering lightly around the audaciously-colored lamps, and listening to the music. It was the song that never ended, words with no rhyme nor reason sung to the same single-bar melody for nearly an hour straight. More like a chanted story than a song; an epic poem, a Kurdish Iliad.

“What do you think he's singing about?” I asked T. One of the guests turned around and started talking to us with broken English.

“Turkey, Iraq, oil!”

“Oh my God, T, I think he's singing about the oil pipeline going through Turkey!”

“Hahaha! He's singing about current events! That's brilliant!”

Okay, so he wasn't reciting Homer. He was Yunis, the Turkmen singer singing the daily news with a voice that seemed to echo off the rims of the Earth- or at least off the mountain ridges of Kurdistan. In this area surrounded by endless fields and rolling mountains, he would suffer no complaints from neighbors about excessive noise, no violation of some silly civil law against disturbance of the peace. Kurdish Ross sat banging away at the keyboard, and neither relented with their music until the electricity shut off suddenly. Lights extinguished, stars brightened, and the singer finally put his mike down to take a swig of water and wipe off his sweat. When the lights came back on, suddenly the men were urging us to sing a number of our own.

“They want me to sing a Korean song, T.”

His eyes got big. “Oh man, that would be totally...”

“But I don't even know any Korean songs!...Oh wait, I do know one.”

“Let's do it!”

So we climbed onto the stage and sang the only Korean song I knew, an old folk song called “Ah-Ri-Rang” about some heartbroken dame who swears that if her lover tries to leave her, he'll develop a foot disease before he can walk even 10 meters (or some distance unit). It was only thanks to the gang of chanters at Rawanduz gorge that I knew the words to this song, and here I was once again singing the song for a bunch of Kurds. Only this time, I was standing on a stage with a mike and a tall, blond Brit next to me singing with whatever Korean vocabulary he'd been able to pick up during his one year in Seoul last year. The phone cameras came out in a flash as we sang our hearts out.

“Ah-ri-rang, Gal-bi joh-wah-yo (I like short ribs)!” T belted out.

“T, I really hope this doesn't end up on youtube.”

“I bet it will!”

I grinned and kept on singing till the end. Cheers and claps met us on the way off the stage. A man named Mokhtar took over the mike and sang “I love you! I love you!” effusively, pointing at T and me. We danced with linked arms and smoked orange-mint flavored shisha and watched intrigued as the men stumbled forward one-by-one to the stage, throwing red 25,000 dinar bills at the Turkmen singer who had regained control of the mike. The cheap ones picked up and re-threw the bills that had fallen on the grass.

Later, sometime way past midnight, as we made our way across the empty highway and back to the deserted school grounds, we could still hear the singing loud and clear through its monster speakers like an alternative call-to-prayer. I wondered what the Muslims were thinking when they heard Mokhtar singing “I love youuuuu, I love youuuuuu!” Elated by our latest adventure, we doubled over with laughter as we climbed the hill leading to the apartment, and thanked our lucky stars that we had decided to ditch the hoops and follow the music instead. It's a decent piece of advice: Follow the music, you never know where it may lead. Unless it leads to the back of a truck. Then avoid the music at all costs, and whatever you do, do not accept the candy!

Burial

June 3, 2009

My doorbell rang. ND was standing outside my door.

“D'you wanna see something weird?” 

“Sure.” I followed her into her apartment.

“It's out on the balcony.”

Hm, mysterious, whatever could it be? Another hideous camel spider? I followed her out to her balcony.

“Look, isn't that weird?”

I looked. Lying on the ground were four dead baby birds, still in their embryonic stage. 

Scattered around the birds were shards of white, clearly the remains of the egg shells that had contained the poor babies. I bent down to take a closer look at the corpses. They looked more human than fully-formed birds! I remembered reading a long time ago about how all animals from humans to frogs looked alike at the embryonic stage of development. It seemed to be true with humans and birds. The wings had yet to fully develop so they looked more like tiny arms with mittens on the hands. Their peanut-shaped bodies were so fragile-looking, the skin on them gray and translucent. I felt surprisingly sad for these birds. They weren't humans, but still, they were a form of life, once living flesh. It felt strange and sad to be peering down so close to these now-lifeless forms. I realized this was the closest I've ever been to a dead creature aside from those belonging to the Arthropoda Kingdom, which I couldn't care less for. 

“What should I do with them?” ND asked after she'd swept up the shell fragments.

“Bury them,” I said. It seemed the proper and obvious thing to do.

We scooped up the fragile things with the broom and slid them into a Bakery & More box. The two of us walked with box in hand down to the dirt ground where the groundskeepers had planted a few trees here and there, not yet grown. 

“How 'bout here?” We stopped at a plot four trees down from the apartment entrance.

“Yeah, looks good. As good as any other spot, I guess.”

We each grabbed a stone and started digging. About six inches in, I paused. 

“Is that deep enough?” 

“How do I know? I've never done this!”

“Oh yeah.”

Throwing our stones down, we took the Bakery & More box, opened it and carefully slid the four bodies into the shallow hole. Tumble, tumble, tumble, tumble. I shuddered. We took up our stones again and threw the loose dirt back into the hole, closing it up. We stared at it for a minute.

“That's gonna be us someday,” said ND.

We stared some more.

“I feel like we should say something,” ND spoke up again.

“Here lie Huey, Duey, Louie,...and Gooey.” 

“Okay, that's enough. Let's go down to the greenhouse.”

We left the emptied Bakery & More box and picked our way across the uneven, stony dirt ground down to the greenhouse. We jumped across a shallow trench and ducked to climb through the opening along the side of it. Straightening up once inside, I gasped. So much leafiness concentrated in a tiny area! I tread the path surrounded on either side by cucumber vines taller than me, strings hanging down from the roof to hold up the growing plants and herbs, and all sorts of gorgeous flowers that one would never find growing naturally in this semi-desert region. 

At the very end, I found these really cool bright red, spherically-shaped flowers with spiked surfaces blooming from beds of leaves the size of two of my hands. I squinted through the back wall of the greenhouse. Through the translucent plastic sheet, the blurry red and gold tint of the sky was visible, hinting at twilight.  Another atypical view of sunset to add to my collection. We ducked out of the tent soon after, jumped clumsily over the trench and ran back up to the apartment, grabbing the empty coffin on the way. Huey, Duey, Louie, and Gooey lay decomposing back into the soil from whence they came.

Khalas.

Sometimes, I feel like the content of my blog makes it seem like it's a pretty rosy life I lead in general. My kindergarden trials and tribulations, for example, are innocuous jabs from, well, a kindergardener, compared to the life-beating punches and kicks and throttlings suffered by victims of war, terminal illnesses, and the like.

But there are other kinds of wars, other kinds of illnesses besides the obvious. Private ones, personal ones that I rarely ever write about because I refuse to acknowledge that they taint my life as they do with their toxicity. But these days, it's become too much to bear. 

While in Iraq, I'd been under the childish illusion that by the time I returned, my parents' marriage issues would have magically resolved themselves- or at least somewhat improved. Time heals all wounds, right?

Instead, upon my return, I learned firsthand that they- my parents themselves- have descended into madness. They are mad...And it's taken a mere- how long have I been home?- four days of living in this madhouse for me to suffer my own mental breakdown, all my resolve, strength, and "maturity" supposedly gained in Iraq over ten months crumbling into dust. 

I believe they are killing me. Last night, I lay in bed screaming in pain and felt as grieved as if my own baby had jut died. Call me weak, call me over-sensitive, but does that matter what I am? I swear, my own parents will be the pre-mature death of me. 

Their so-called "marriage" is no bond of love nor decency, but one of sickness and hatred like a rotting corpse, and it has infected the entire household- us poor kids- for more than two decades. In the present state of things, the day after I returned from Iraq, my mother threw a restraining order (against her, by my childhood friend's mother) in my face, and my own father stole $100 from me. I wish I could say I was kidding. 

Well khalas, as they say in the Mideast. Enough. I am finished with their sick, humorless games. I used to play the good, kind daughter to my father, despite my knowledge of his numerous transgressions, but as of today, I loathe him and will not play nice. I used to sympathize with my mother and give her endless daughterly advice because in her eyes, she was the victim of the world and no one cared about her. But as of today, I will not pander to her self-pity. 

Anyway, she's got it all wrong. In accepting all my father's daggers like an abused dog who stays loyally by her master's side all black and blue, she is only committing a tortuously slow suicide- unlike the quick burnings that 800 Kurdish women opt for every year. To sigh and admit that everything is "all my fault" is not the act of a selfless martyr as she delusions herself to be. No, it is an act of the most supreme utter selfishness to think- or claim- that you are the cause of so many ills, and to wallow in self-pity as my mother does.

And worst of all- as a mother- to imagine that she is the sole victim of the raining blows of their sick, rotting marriage is her biggest mistake. She has no idea how much we used to care, to agonize, to spill tears over her situation, all our advice falling on deaf, selfish, self-pitying ears for all these years. For all these years, it's been eating us up inside like a cancer. 

Well Khalas- I am through caring. 

Beyond the Canvas

Would a masterpiece still be a masterpiece if you found out someone else had painted it? 

In the past, I might have said yes, but now I would answer that question with a resounding no. From my experiences of traveling around and visiting ancient sites in Iraq, I know that for example, the main reason why I got so excited about exploring Shanidar Cave was because of what was found inside it in the '50s. The reason why I love exploring the citadel so much is because of its sheer oldness. If someone suddenly revealed to me that those Neanderthals weren't authentic, or that actually the citadel was a fake, built just a hundred years ago instead of between five and eight thousand years ago, my interest in those sites would plummet without a doubt. 

It's not always just about what you're seeing. Sometimes, the worth of things is based on intangible aspects, like the story behind it, or simply its age- how much time and history it has seen and withstood. It's like judging an old woman not by her wrinkles, saggy boobs and salt-and-pepper hair, but by what those blue eyes have beheld, such things she must have seen.

Vodka, I Need Vodka

May 28, 2009

“You need a drink or something?”

How did he know? After an extra long day of staying at school until 7:30 in the evening for the spring concert, and changing 20 5-year-olds into and out of their costumes while trying not to breathe in the fetid smell of kid feet, and getting rewarded for my hard work with a most diplomatically-worded accusation from the school director-

“You are not supposed to take responsibility for the children.”-

damn straight I needed a drink! I followed him to his room and downed 3 shots of vodka at his kitchen counter and felt so much better as the ice-cold vodka seeped to my head and worked its masseuse-like magic, overpowering the scarily venomous anger and hatred that was coursing through my veins. The two of us and F and T went down to the big gym to shoot some hoops then. When I got there, though, my drunken self was immediately drawn to the small, netted trampoline in the corner. My head in a haze, I climbed onto the tramp and recklessly threw drunken back tucks into the air. Only, on the third landing, I rebounded too hard and smashed into the barred window behind me. Ouch, my back. I stuck to shooting hoops and grading exams after that. Still, nothing like throwing your body around like a ragged doll and smashing it against a few walls to take your mind off of more painful, more hurtful events. Sigh. My emotions are much too fragile for this administration. 

* * *

It is evening now. After a very Korean dinner of dried seaweed and rice (we even ate with chopsticks I stole from the Sheraton and the not-so-great Chinese restaurant in Ainkawa), I am washing the dishes, while ND is opening her balcony.

“It's the weekend! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” she squealed.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” I squealed in response. 

She said weekends make her feel like she could fly. I second that! We hung out on her balcony watching the sun sinking slowly, its rays bursting radiantly (and radially) from a central orange sphere hovering low in the immense sky smoking with curly-edged clouds. I snapped some photos of ND silhouetted against the painted sky, painting her nails a bright red and talking about the degeneration of her faith in Islam, while the call to prayer sounded hauntingly from far-away speakers. She said the call to prayer used to scare her stupid when she was little. To me, hearing it in this isolated compound surrounded by imposing mountains, its ghostly, exotic melody can register as either comforting or lonely, depending on my mood. 

Later, I caught a ride with our shuttle driver down to the coke shop across the street. I walked around the back of the shed through shadowy piles of crates and leafy plants as tall as me, the sky now a dusky cornflower blue and peaceful, hushed. Inside his shop, the shopkeeper treated me like someone special, as usual, handing me a free Magnum ice cream bar as I was heading out as if he were handing me a bouquet of flowers. It was better than flowers. You can't eat flowers. And even if you tried, it wouldn't taste creamy and chocolate-y with a hint of almond, yummmmm. The coke shop is a pretty magical place. I always manage to leave it happier than when I went in. 

Made Up

May 26, 2009

Today, I wore make-up to school for the second time. Aland, the class clown in my grade 2 class, caught up with me on the way to my KG classroom.

“Miss, are you a clown?” he asked, genuinely curious.

“Why? You mean because of this?” I gestured around my made-up face.

He nodded, “why did you do that?”

“Because I felt funny,” I replied, “like a clown.”

The two clowns shared a laugh before heading into their first period classes. 

Clarry's Clues: Epilogue

May 16, 2009

I can just imagine the conversation around the dinner table tonight. The driver returns home. He sits at the table where his wife is waiting with dinner she had spent over an hour preparing- rice, flatbread, soup, and lamb. He tastes the soup. “This soup is cold.” He tastes the bread. “This bread isn't flat enough.” His wife rolls her eyes and contemplates stuffing a fist into his mouth. Instead, she tries to divert with a conversation: “So how was your day today, honey?” He doesn't answer at first because he is too busy scarfing down the food with gusto, despite the coldness and the bread that isn't flat enough. As she watches him eat like a beast, his wife remembers that one time he tore into a chicken leg so impatiently that one of his teeth came out of his mouth with the leg. She tries to will it into happening again. Finally, after a huge, manly, reverberating burp and fart, a piece of chicken still hanging off his moustache, but teeth still intact, he remembers that his wife had said something. He answers inadvertently, “You won't believe what I did today.”

“What's that honey?”

“I drove a bunch of crazy Americans to a monastery.”

Great. How many of those sluts' breasts did he fondle? She wondered to herself. 

“Honey, did you hear what I said? A monastery!”

“We have a monastery?”

....

Curtain.

Clarry's Clues Part II: Jerwana Aqueduct

 May 16, 2009

It was no easier to find than the monastery. 

“Did we pass it?”

“Did we pass it yet?”

“Which bright building is it?”

“Was that uphill enough?”

It didn't help to that our driver was a petulant child. He grumbled in Kurdish- something about foreigners with their maps, among other complaints and useless comments. Suddenly, though, “the clues came together nicely” as J put it. We saw the bright building, the road inclined upward noticeably, and J saw what could pass as a dirt road. These clues were spot on! Of course, the driver wouldn't believe us so we ended up driving on for another half mile before he obliged us map-touting foreigners and turned around to follow the dirt road. It turned out to the be the wrong dirt road, but the right one wasn't that far off, and we managed to find it, thank heavens. 

As the cab crept over the narrow dirt path, jostling our guts with every bump and hole on the unpaved surface, Oscar the Grouch grumbled:

“I bet we're the first ones to ever set foot in this place.”

It wasn't true of course. Obviously, Mr. Clarry had set foot here in the recent past. But really, Oscar probably wasn't too far off from the truth, from the look of the place. We were creeping along a dirt path in the middle of an enormous, endless field of wheat under an enormous sky. It truly felt like uncharted territory, and the only thing we could think was...”what's an aqueduct?” What in the world were we even looking for? A bridge of some sort? What was it made of? How big was it? Was there still water there? Questions and doubts flooded each explorer's head until-

“There it is, I see it!” T said suddenly, pointing.

“Where? Where? You mean in the fields? Oh, I see it! Oh my god! Wow!...” First we saw a pile of stones. And then the stones grew more numerous and orderly. We got out of the cab and stared. A few local teenage boys stared back at us. They had been lounging around on top of the beginnings of the stone structure as they probably did every day, and suddenly a band of foreigners had appeared. 

“First one to find the cuneiform inscriptions wins...(wins what?)!”

We all scrambled to begin the search, plowing through scratchy plants and colonies of huge ants going about their daily business, and keeping our eyes peeled for inscriptions in the stone. 

“Found it!” ND cried several times and laughing in jest as we looked up the first time, startled and fooled. 

“You should sound a lot more excited if you've really found it, you know,” I told her the next time she cried foul. Two minutes later, J, who'd been exploring the very end of the long structure along its side, cried out,

“Oh my god, I've found it!” I jumped down and joined her and cried out in excitement “Oh my GOD! This is SO COOL!”

Of course, ND wouldn't believe us. But we weren't lying. There, inscribed onto the surface of dozens of the large, block-like gray stones, were cuneiform scripts, a writing system invented 5000 years ago, employed by Akkadians and Assyrians and Babylonians during the beginning of human civilization, and by King Sennacherib, nearly 3000 years ago, in order to record details onto the surface of this aqueduct. What sort of details, I had no clue, since I had only studied this script for a few months a couple years ago. People had made fun of me for studying such a useless language. I had made fun of myself! Now, I wish I had studied more. Who knew I'd be in the cradle of civilization two years later, standing in the middle of a field of thistles and ants before an ancient set of stones inscribed with my useless, dead language? 

We took pictures of our amazing find. As I mentioned, I nearly killed our driver because he touched me, and all-too-soon, we were heading back to the car. T and I looked back and oohed and ahhed at a strip of sky just above the horizon, burning a fiery, iridescent yellow and orange. Above this firelight strip, the rest of the enormous sky, blue and wet-looking and full of clouds hung over the dry yellow and orange plains, some of the clouds pulling downward toward the plains like cobwebs hanging down from the sky. 

“The sky looks quite angry, doesn't it?” commented J.

“Like our driver,” I replied, “Angry sky, angry driver.”

Around us, birds chirped merrily and sheep grazed in the distance, and the acres and acres of wheat, now golden with the light of sunset, made me think of Sting's “Fields of Gold”, which was not a part of Corbin's imaginary world either. As we were going back down the stone blocks of the aqueduct, ND's picked up her phone, and I heard her say to the person on the other end of the line: “Oh my god, we went to the most amazing place ever.” I laughed and shook my head. This is how she described every place that she ever went to. If we'd found a one-room shack with a filthy hole-in-the-ground toilet inside with flies buzzing around the decaying feces in these fields instead of an aqueduct with ancient cuneiform writing on it, she'd still tell anyone who asked that it was the most amazing place she'd ever seen. 

I wouldn't say it was the most amazing. It's hard to compare when you've seen so many amazing things. What would you rate as more amazing, cuneiform inscriptions on an ancient aqueduct older than the famous Roman ones, or an ancient 4th century monastery atop a mountain with an amazing view and a really nice monk inside? Which would you rate as more amazing, that monastery, or a huge, limestone cave where 9 Neanderthal remains were unearthed, also with an amazing view? That cave, or an ancient thousands-of-years-old citadel in the middle of a bustling city with beautiful views of sunset? It's hard to say...

What's easy to say is that the experience of seeing these cool sites in Iraq far outweighs anything I've seen in other countries (except maybe Oman...they had water! Beautiful waters and cave pools and secluded desert beaches). Even Egypt with its ancient pyramids and hieroglyphs and glorified cemeteries couldn't match up to our discoveries in Iraq- because of exactly that reason. In Iraq, we were discoverers; few others have ever seen what we were seeing, nothing was mapped out with tourist maps and road signs and guides, no site was swarming with tourists. We were like true pioneers, hunting for things that others were telling us didn't even exist, and others still were wondering how we even knew about these things when even the villagers one village over had no clue. We were showing the local, middle-aged taxi driver places he'd never even knew existed in his own country. We were true pioneers, paving the way for tourism in Northern Iraq. According to the locals, we were a bunch of crazy foreigners. According to the taxi driver, we were fools, but fools who you could actually lend some credence to as he found out. Still, his grouchiness barely waned by the end of the trip.

“He hates us,” ND said again as he bellyached once again, even as we were heading home. “Don't worry,” I reassured her, “that's his way of showing happiness and gratitude. Ten years later, he'll really thank us because he'll be the only one who knows how to get to these places.” We passed by the Arbella/Gaugamela battlefield again.

“There's the battlefield again.”

Wow, how ever did she recognize it from all the other fields? We pondered strange things in the car while the sky grew dusky, then dark. Like how we had been only 30 km from the most dangerous city in Iraq. Or the difference between “long” and “tall”. Or how sheep never look the way they're portrayed in cartoons. T nearly hugged Grumpy at one point. Grumpy only got grumpier. The constant complaining continued right up to our doorstep, as he demanded more than the agreed-upon sum. Well, at least you couldn't say he wasn't constant in one way or another. We tossed in another few thousand dinars just to mollify him (he thanked us by saying it wasn't enough), and walked into our apartment complex, another day gone, and tomorrow we had school. 

Clarry's Clues Part I: Mor Matti Monastery

May 16, 2009

“He hates us” ND kept saying in the beginning, of our driver. “It's okay, we hate him too- it's mutual.” I've become quite the acidic person since coming to Iraq. I used to care if someone appeared to be angry with me. Now I couldn't give a flying rat's ass, as long as I know it's not my fault. It was a waste of my time, I realized, trying to appease assholes and bitches. Better to just buy them some ice cream and give them time to cool off, and wait for them to come around, if they ever came around. But it was nice to have ND there- she still cared, so her presence brought out the small part of me that still cared and still tried to understand despite all my tough talk. It was important to not let acceptance of asshole-ness tip into actual hatred.

“Get ready,” ND told the driver in Kurdish, “we're about to take you on an amazing tour of your own country.” She was right, and he knew it. Yet, you would think we were dragging him across a bed of nails the entire time. Even when we could tell that he was amazed, he still, like an obstinate child, refused to lighten up and quit his constant bellyaching. I knew instantly what type of personality he was- the happier he was, the more chronically he complained. Sigh. I felt bad for his wife. Especially when he kept trying to find excuses to get close to and touch me and J. I nearly pounced on him and gave him a fistful when he impatiently tapped me three times on the underside of my upper arm (the flabby side, no less!) as I was holding up my camera to take a picture of the amazing aqueduct. Lucky for him, instead of following my deadly jungle cat-like instinct, I merely gave him a dirty look and yelled at him. Asshole.

The driver was making the journey so difficult, that we weren't even sure we would ever make it to the monastery. So when we actually did find it, I was overwhelmed with surprise, relief, and excitement. It actually existed! It was no “Na Koja Abad”, a Persian term meaning “land of No-where”, which I had come across while reading Henry Corbin's Mundus Imaginalis. The monastery did exist in the realm of the real, but when we first spotted it from the road, a tiny structure embedded high up on Mount Maqloub, and of a similar light brown color, I was not so surprised that we had such a hard time finding it. It seemed a part of the mountain itself, a chameleon structure barely visible from hundreds of feet below and beyond. Even the driver betrayed interest, his eyes unbelieving. These crazy foreigners (that would be us) weren't so crazy after all. We crept up the steep and winding road, passed by a pointy M-shaped archway whose ends hung incomplete in mid-air, parked and got out of the cab, cramped and sweaty from the summer's heat. 

I balked at the view over the rail. Below me was a sea of brown, vast and desert-like with slender roads weaving through like white ribbons. The sun alighted on the landscape in irregular patterns of light and shade, turning the uniform brown into a colorful canvas of burnt red, pale yellows, beige and grayish-brown. Far in the distance from the valley's relatively flat surface rose rounded brown mounds imprinted with whirly patterns like the imprints on human fingers. If I had been religious, I'd have believed that they were the fingerprints of God, evidence that he had shaped the mounds of the Earth with his own two hands like a potter leaving his mark on the clay. 

Of course, I am not religious. My heathen feet climbed the steps to the veranda and eventually entered the monastery. Inside was a golden-brown atrium that was surrounded by arches galore and had the wonderful feel of open air and lightness. Looking back, I could see the imprinted mountains framed by the doorway's dark brown wooden frame. Above the door were glass-less apertures for windows enclosing the bell tower, above that a pumpkin-like round dome topped by an Eastern Orthodox cross, and then the blue sky. It felt like heaven up here, so light and airy. 

We spent a long time in there, exploring the atrium, the cellar, the chapel, and the most beautiful crypt I've ever seen (again, not saying much). This was the crypt of Saint Matthew (known as Mor Matti here), an Assyrian monk who'd escaped persecution in Diyarbakir (in eastern Turkey) and came seeking shelter in this secluded mountaintop structure 30 km from Mosul. The crypt was a room within the chapel, a small, square chamber built of a lovely white stone mottled with pale gray, deliciously cool in the summer's heat. Attached to the walls and ceiling were wishing scarves like lacy bridal veils, and in one corner lay a shackle and chain. I put it on for fun, and T looked at me as he always does, as if I've committed a grievous sin. If I had, the shackle would not come undone on its own and my wish would not come true. This was how the wishing shackle worked. Of course, after he got the OK from our unofficial Baghdadi guide, he was eager to get a photo of himself choking on the shackles, to which I, as the stereotypical camera-wielding Asian tourist, happily obliged. Later, our guide showed us her family's temporary room for the duration of their pilgrimage, and I got to meet her fat, golden-haired, peachy-pink cherub-like nephew, George, and cover him with camera kisses as he laughed and squealed with pleasure, my own heart nearly melting like 21st century ice caps affected by global warming. I love happy babies!

Ahem. Anyway, this Syriac Orthodox monastery, founded in AD 363 by Mor Matti, but built even earlier, had housed hundreds of monks since its founding, but now only housed 6. We met one of them, Monk Yusuf, and chatted with him in his study. He was an amiable, peaceful man, who could probably put the most timid person at ease with one look of his kind eyes. I mentioned Mr. Clarry, as he had directed me to in his Clues. 

“Do you know him?”

“Sure, I know him. He's my best friend,” he replied with a smile. I didn't realize until later that he was being facetious. Gee, I'm so gullible, even a monk can fool me! I've been bamboozled by a man of God. After checking out the view from the second-story veranda and climbing down steep old steps outside the monastery to explore Mor Matti's prayer chamber and the wishing tree on the way, we said goodbye to our Baghdad tour guides and Monk Yusuf, and I sat in the cab as it rolled down the steep incline, thinking how cool it must be to be able to say, “my best friend is a monk”. 

We'd spent a good two hours at least in that monastery, so by the time we left, it was past 4 pm. Despite the late hour, we decided to keep going, on to the next item in Mr. Clarry's instructions- the Arbella Battlefield, where Alexander the Great had defeated the Persian King Darius in 321 BC. It was exactly as Mr. Clarry had described. Just a field where an amazing event had taken place more than 2000 years ago, but which was in essence and totality, just a field. We weren't even sure if it was the right field. No civil war re-enactments here, my friends. We did our best to imagine Alexander dealing the final blow to the great Kind of the East, and moved on quickly to the next item on the list: the Jerwana Aqueduct.

Clarry's Clues: Prelude

May 16, 2009

On May 14th, I had a long chat on the phone with Stafford Clarry, the Humanitarian Advisor for the KRG. I spent the entire time listening to him telling me about all these places I could go to in Northern Iraq, places very few people knew about. But he'd been here since 1991, when he worked with the UN in their resettlement project. He knew the lay of the land better than anyone, even the locals. After the conversation, he sent me the following email:

Angie,

 

Mar Matti (St. Matthew) Syrian Orthodox Monastery

On Maqlub Mountain, below are some photos

On the Erbil-Mosul road, turn right to Bartilla and head toward Bardarash

Much before Bardarash, turn left where there is a checkpoint, on the south side of Maqlub mountain.

Drive all the way up to the monastery and go inside.  There are WC facilities here.

Ask for Monk Yusuf (Joseph) who speaks good English.  Mention my name.

Don't miss the church upstairs towards the back, and the crypt with the chain and collar attached to the floor in one of the corners. The chain and collar are for making wishes.

Afterwards, drive out to the main road, turn left and head toward Bardarash, Rovia, to Jerwana, Shekhan, Khanis, Lalish.

 

Gaugamela battlefield (where Alexander the Great defeated the Persian King Darius, 321 BC)

Beyond Chhra, a big village, look left, that's the battlefield

Also known as the Battle of Arbella (Erbil) because it was the closest known town at the time.

 

After Chhra there is a restaurant on the right for food and clean enough facilities including separate WC for women.

 

Sennacherib's aqueduct at Jerwana, 700 BC

Here's the link to the 140-page report with photos:

http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/catalog/oip/oip24.html

It's just 2 minutes off the main road to the right.  You can't see it from the main road because it's flat.

The turnoff is before the junction where you turn to Shekhan, a well-known district town.

Before going up a hill on the main road there is a bright colored building on the left.  The road to the right is sort of opposite this bright building.  It's a dirt road, but you go only a short distance.  The aqueduct carried water across a shallow valley.  The cuneiform writing is on the side at the bottom.

 

Khanis - Assyrian rock carvings and statues

This is where Sennacherib's canal to Nineveh begins.  It ran 37 kilometers.

Go through Shekhan (Ain Sifni) town and after 15 minutes or so there is good paved road to the right.

Take the road for about 15 minutes, look at the huge statue fallen into the waters edge and the sculptures on the wall above.

Return to the Shekhan road and turn right.  Ahead on the left is the road to Lalish.

 

Lalish

You can go inside the main temple. Take off your shoes.  Do not step on thresholds; step over them.

Go down to the crypt of Sheikh Adi and don't miss the room with the clay jars of vegetable oil for the oil lamps.

Wander around outside to the other temples. 

WC facilities are available where you might be invited to tea.

 

Enjoy yourselves.

 

Best,

Stafford

It was the prelude to a big scavenger hunt around Northern Iraq that we have yet to finish. Two days later, T, J, ND and I hitched a ride to the Masif garage to catch a cab that would take us all the way to Lalish. We bargained hard for a decent price and paid for it all day long with a Bitter Betty, a peevish, grouchy, pervy driver who smoked like a chimney.

The Burnt Faces of Saddam

May 16, 2009

We had to beg our way into the citadel today. It was passed closing time and they were getting more strict about sticking to the rules. But they gave in at last, and what did I do to repay their leniency? I broke into the burnt-down antique shop. The shop had burnt down last November, and every since, I've been meaning to explore the ruins of the fire. At last I was there, and it wasn't too difficult to get in. All I had to do was climb over a short, slightly unstable wall of stone bricks blocking the arched entrance. It didn't exactly spell “Do Not Enter”. Okay, it sort of did, but nothing like yellow tape blocking off a crime scene. They make it too easy, it's almost boring.

On the other side of the stone bricks, I straightened up, dusted myself off, and looked around. I had stepped into a black-and-white world of ashes and burnt pages, freed from their ancient binds, charred rugs, their vivid colors dimmed by the fire, broken bits of ancient teapots and other ancient household items,...The normal reaction would have been to be at least somewhat upset that such priceless artifacts had been utterly destroyed in one fell swoop of fire, but initially as I gazed around at my surroundings, all I could think was what a beautiful shot it would have made for my camera, which I had regrettably forgotten to take with me that day. The dominating colors were black and white, which would have made for perfect contrast. The whitewashed pillars and staircases and walls, and other architectural structures were streaked with soot, and with the black, wrought-iron rails, looked haunting. Pieces of the building hung half-broken off edges; a frayed, burnt rug hung down from the  second-floor rail. A pile of broken framed pictures had been stacked against one wall. The floor of one room was scattered with burnt woven shepherd bags.  Loose pages from books containing Arabic script lay scattered and strewn all over the place, yellowed with age and blackened by fire. 

I wandered carefully up the short flight of charred, unstable, white-washed steps leading to a room where months ago, during my very first visit to the citadel, I had found a cool, electric blue dagger adorned with the evil eye, hamsa, and strange scripts. This time, I found nothing but broken tea sets in piles on the floor amongst broken wood planks and other scraps. What a shame. Back out in the main room, I explored the mess on the ground and in a pile of rubble, discovered a wad of old Iraqi dinars with Saddam pictured on the front of every denomination. Wow, these were supposed to be impossible to get a hold of nowadays! I pocketed the wad and left soon afterwards, climbing back over the stone brick wall and dusting off my jeans. Just in time, too, as one of the friendly guards was coming to look for me. I was taking too long and my friends were waiting outside, wondering where I'd gone. This was Citadel Survey #5.

Kids' Drawings

Last Thursday, the last day of the school week, I gave out pictures of Marie the Cat for the kids to color. On Sunday morning, Shene gave hers back to me colored, and with the name "LuluCaty" scrawled all over one side in several colors, and just the letter u (or is it n or h?) scrawled all over the other side. 

Whatever could it mean?

I kid about this, but sometimes I do wonder...kids' drawings can reveal a lot of what's on their mind. For instance, there's this kid, "Farmer" who in the beginning, was one of the most troublesome kids in the class- purposefully just scribbling all over his paper just to irk me, saying other kids hit him so he can get a sticker- once he figured out the whole positive reinforcement thing, pissing on himself so that he wouldn't have to wait to use the bathroom. I tell you this kid is wicked and conniving by nature. He's a good student now, but I don't think he'll ever lose that bad nature of his. It's lucky that he's got a kindergarden crush on Shene- sometimes, I use that against him, though he doesn't know it. He doesn't seem to realize that adults can be even more conniving them he. Anyway, the interesting thing about Farmer is, he has a major habit of scrawling his name along with select others all over his worksheets. Usually, he'll write the names of those that sit at his own table. Yesterday, when I switched him to a different table, he wrote the names of the kids at his new table all over his math worksheet.

Whatever could it mean?

For the first few months, whenever I gave out paper for them to draw on, the majority of them would draw a "happy face/sad face" list, a replica of the one I have on my board every day to reward good behavior and deter bad ones. Only in their list, they would write their own name under the happy face side like 5 times, and then the name of a typically badly behaved kid on the other side. Sometimes, they'd have fish and other drawings on the side, but this list would be the centerpiece of their artwork. It made me realize what a big deal it was for them. I sincerely hope I've widened their world a bit more since then. Can you imagine that list being your entire world? That's just sad. I've moved on to a star chart- giving stars to each table for being good, rather than to the individual. This group-rewarding system is definitely encouraging cooperative behavior, but I wonder how it's affecting their mentality?

They also like to draw me a lot, with slanted eyes, doing various things like taking a zebra for a walk. Man, they're so funny! Hoz in particular has become so irresistibly cute days, with his munchkin size and huge, open-mouthed grin, and his puppy-like playfulness. He's quite the acrobat too, throwing himself into cartwheels and break dance-like moves, so fearless for such a little guy. I ran into him a few minutes before school began the other day, so we walked to class together hand-in-hand, Hoz positively brimming with pride and happiness as he trotted next to his teacher. I love how they get so excited about seeing me on the outside- anywhere outside the classroom where they spend the majority of their day. I can't get over how small their world is.

KG has improved drastically since I got my new helper, Miss Valentina. It feels more like a partnership now because she actually enjoys being with the kids and playing with them, which my old helper never had the energy, patience, skill, nor desire for. I love going into my classroom to find all the kids crowded around her, uncharacteristically silent and entranced, as she relates a story to them in Kurdish. We make a good team. 

Not Just a Myth

We caught a “camel spider” (actually a scorpion) wandering in our hallway today. It was the size of my palm- and it was a baby. You could see its black jaws clamping open and closed as it wriggled around frantically under the tupperware in the poison powder and Dettol. My next-door-neighbor had seen its mother last night on her balcony. It was the size of a man's thigh. While she was inside searching futilely for a pan or dish large enough to trap it, it vanished. 

The Horrors Within

Horror Stories

I pulled off my flip-flops before sitting down on the ledge. If they happened to fall off my feet, there would be no getting them back for the drop was too far down. The rugged, red mountains rolled into smoother, dimpled green and brown slopes as the eye traveled westward toward the setting sun and back up the path L and I had just wandered down. From beneath my dangling, bare feet, the lush, green valley extended unimaginably far, its incredible vastness taking my breath away as good as any view of the ocean, its hillsides dotted with red poppies like drops of blood on the endless sea of green.

“In the early mornings, in the light of the rising sun,” said L, “it looks like a red carpet spread all over the grass.”

A poppy carpet? I liked the image of that. Over the jagged tabletop of the more rugged reddened mountains to the east, hung a mound of puffy white cloud with a hole in its underside that appeared artificially carved out- as if clouds were solid enough to be carved. Strange. It looked as if someone had been curious to see what lay inside a cloud. Further east along the rugged reddish slopes and far, far above the hole-y, hollow cloud mound hovered the day moon. It was perfectly spherical and the color of very very very light oil, a luminous white-yellow, so pale against the still-light summer sky which blushed an ever-so-pale shade of pink. Usually, I love when the sky is awash with all the colors of the rainbow, but this more subtle variety of sunset was just as beautiful, especially with the serene moon hanging above, a mother-of-pearl waiting patiently for its turn to shine.

As I sat at the ledge, just a hop away from being immersed in the very landscape itself, I listened as L told me horror stories of marrying into the family of a closed society. She was such a strong person. I don't know if I would have been able to bear the burden of hate and inacceptance without resorting to escape from the whole thing. I'm a regular Houdini when it comes to dealing with people problems. But, she says, for all the adversity they faced from the outside, their own relationship came out all the stronger for it.

She told me other horror stories about trying to eradicate the plight of working children that to this day afflicts Kurdistan, and discovering that some of those CD shops in the bazaar that played ripped dvds all day long was no ordinary CD shop, but rather a house of horrors for the poor working children who sold packs of gum all day around the bazaar. You can imagine what sort of dvds a bunch of repressed men would be watching as the youthful salesboy wandered in to sell his cheap 15 cent packs of gum. If caught, both the offender and the child-victim would get thrown into jail for homosexuality. Not all the CD shops in the bazaar were of that kind. But even though the government was making efforts to shut them down, they continue to crop up here and there, and that horrified me because such nightmarish thoughts never occurred to me as I wandered wide-eyed and amazed every week through the maze-like outdoor market, so thrilling in its bee hive-like busy-ness. How could such things be happening before my very eyes? How blind and naïve I could be!

It seemed strange to me that we were talking about such horrible things while sitting in front of such a gorgeous landscape. The contrast between the beautiful and the horrible was jarring and incomprehensible. Yet, I felt in awe of L, that she had done real, concrete, grassroots work to put a stop to such horrors. Although she was not the least bit Kurdish in blood, she had a deep claim to the place because of all the work she put into making it a good place, a place worthy of the beauty of its natural landscape. We needed more people like her everywhere. For all the work she's put in to bring serious change to Kurdistan, though, she has an interesting view of the nature of people:

“I don't try to change people. I don't think people can be changed.”

I stared at her aghast. “But what about all your work...?”

But I realized the answer even before I finished my question. How do you bring openness to such a closed society? How do you ensure that the change will be permanent and not an isolated case, an individual success story that will die out with the few people involved? Lasting change is made generation by generation. To bring change to a society, you have to influence an entire generation so that the effects of the influence will get passed on like a gene to the next generation- a cultural gene flow. This is why L looked at her job as an English teacher as more than just a job. After all, if we were so keen on helping the ones who really needed help, what were we doing exactly by educating the rich kids in Kurdistan rather than the ones living in village mud-brick homes with tattered clothes and no books? Of course, we shouldn't punish kids for being born into a world that was not of their own choosing, whether rich or poor. And yet, it galls me sometimes when my KGs tell me about the latest expensive toy they've got at home, or when I hear that the PM's son who's only in grade 6 has a $7000 phone. WTF? Even iPhone's don't cost anywhere near that much! It must be made of 100 dollar bills. On the other hand, these kids are the ones who will be running this region in the future. What better way to change a society than to expose its future leaders to alternative ways at a place of learning, while their minds are still young and impressionable? I feel like I'm doing a good thing at this school by showing my kids that dresses that show some leg are a thing of beauty, not shame, and that female teachers can be just as smart (or smarter!) than male ones. And about recycling.

“Where does paper come from?” I randomly asked my grade 2's the other day as I was handing out worksheets.

“I know, I know! (They always say that, but it's almost never true.) From the printer!” (See what I mean?)

In all these months, this job had settled into “just” a job. Now I recalled the sense of higher purpose that I had used to partially justify my taking this job in the first place. Since then, I've wavered from believing in higher purposes to tossing the idealistic concept to the dusty winds as a bunch of bullshit. I was wavering again. Besides that, the cool thing about teaching is that there are now 26 kindergardeners and 26 8-year-olds in Kurdistan whose brains are filled with the contents of my brain. Hm, I can just hear the jokes now. Uh oh, now we've got a bunch of dumbasses running around Kurdistan, blah blah blah.

One bad part about teaching is, sometimes I just don't feel like being up front and center stage entertaining the crowd. But as a teacher, the spotlight is on you everyday, every hour you have class, and you have to be ready and energetic no matter how you feel. That constant drive can be pretty exhausting by the end of the week especially with the kindergardeners. Sometimes, when I come into the class toward the end of the day feeling pooped, and I see little Miran or one of the other kids laying across the table on his back watching the ceiling, instead of giving him the Glare and making him sit properly in a chair, I join him with the ceiling-watching. In a matter of seconds though, without fail, my view of the ceiling is blocked by the faces of a dozen little rugrats climbing all over me and trying to tickle or strangle and suffocate me, sometimes it's hard to tell which. Crazy kids. And then somebody starts crying because a stray fist knocked into his eye, or because one kid pushed another who fell into another and so on like dominos until they all fell on top of the one unfortunate kid. They bring almost all violence upon themselves, I swear.

More Horror Behind the Beauty

Today, a couple of my grade 2 students tagged along as usual as I walked back to the apartments for lunch. The walkway is lined with leafy, thin-trunked trees growing from the imported grass surrounding either side of the stone bricks. As I leaned against a pillar about to send them back to recess before entering the apartment complex, one of them asked me to test him on times tables so I started firing away with difficult ones since he was so eager.

“What's 17 squared?”

“3- no 2...89!”

“What's 16 squared?”

“2 hundred...”

As he was struggling for the answer, the other one I call AR, who was not so into memorizing the larger squares suddenly cried out, “Wow, look on the tree!” We both turned to look, squares abandoned. There were berries dangling from the leaves of the nearby tree! Some were still green, but a lot of them were turning a dull shade of red. They were like raspberries, but longer- mulberries.

“This one is especially beautiful!” breathed AR, stepping closer to the tree, pointing at a ripe, black one. He probably meant to say 'ripe', but I love it when non-native English speakers use “beautiful” for things we don't usually call beautiful. They only do it because of lack of better vocabulary, but all the same, it sounds poetic. I pulled the “especially beautiful” one off its branch and popped it into my mouth. Mmm, sweet! I popped in a couple more, my fingers already stained red with the mulberry juice.

“You guys like the green ones, don't you?” I joked. For some reason, Kurds adore all things sour, and now that it is springtime, I see kids going around during lunchtime with ziplock bags of tiny green apples, crispy green cherries, and other fruits picked long before ripening, and also those long sticks of what looks like celery with herpes which is both sour and bitter. It's really good with salt, they claim. They never believe me when I say I don't want to try some, yet again. Why anyone would want to eat things that make their face pucker and cringe is beyond my comprehension- unless it was sweet, too, like sour skittles, mmm. Possibly, it's like how Koreans love all things spicy. Why would you enjoy eating something that burns your mouth and makes you cry? It's hard to say...I think Koreans are genetically masochistic. I bet if it weren't for the cultural repression, a lot of Koreans would enjoy the whip and handcuffs in bed.

Anyway, horrors of horrors, later in the evening, I found out that these mulberry trees are watered with toilet water. Holy SHIT...why do they not tell us these things??? Why do we have to get this sort of information by chance from one of the Bangladeshi cleaners? The kids were all over those berries during school today! Great maybe they'll all get sick and we'll get a few days off from school. Holy shit, holy SHIT, my blood is going to be so contaminated by the time I get back to the States. This one year in Iraq is going to take years from my total lifespan, I swear to God, w'allah, w'allah...

Shanidar Cave: Adventure Through Time

Today, I took a temporal journey into prehistoric times.

It was 11:30 in the morning on a Friday. We could have waited for hours for an empty cab, but we were saved this eternal wait by a large, old, boxy-looking white van that pulled over off the highway to offer us helpless highway loiterers a ride. The first thing I noticed about the driver was that he had these amazing cerulean blue eyes that contrasted strangely with his dark hair.

“Could you give us a ride to the Masif garage?”

Of course he would!

“Could you give us a ride all the way to Shanidar Cave?”

We didn't really believe he would actually say yes, after all, the cave was more than one hour away, driving at the normal speed of 120 km/hour. I mean, didn't he have a job, a family, or something to take care of? But say yes he did! Perhaps all he had was his rickety old white van. Perhaps we underestimated his curiosity, as well as the irresistibly curious appearance of 4 Westerners loitering along the highways of Kurdistan. Clearly, an adventure was forthcoming, if only he stopped and seized the opportunity. Carpe diem- and what an amazing day it turned out to be, for this was no ordinary van, but a time machine that would take us eons and eons into the past.

Before journeying into the past, we stopped by the nearby town of Shaqlawa to buy some of their famous sweets. I tried this glutinous roll covered with green flakes. It tasted so familiar! After a minute of thoughtful chewing, I figured out that the familiar taste was cardamom. Imagine me being able to identify cardamom! Before my tea brewing days, I couldn't have told you cardamom from my own mom. Now I can tell you that one is flat, oval, and greenish with a bitter aroma, while the other...is flat in a way, but definitely not oval, greenish, nor bitter-smelling.

Anyway...onward to Shanidar Cave! It was in this cave that archaeologist Ralph Solecki discovered 9 Neanderthal skeletons in the 1950's, showing intriguing evidence that they ritually buried their dead, and that they healed their sick rather than heartlessly ditching them. Neanderthals, like grieving elephants, were much more “human” (by this, they mean “compassionate”) than was previously thought. Besides the adult remains, the remains of a baby Neanderthal were also dug up from the layers.

The discovery of the Neanderthals inspired an entire fictional book series called “The Clan of the Cave Bears”. It's fun to imagine that hundreds of thousands of years later, our own bones might be dug up by futuristic archaeologists, and fictional accounts written about our own lives by futuristic authors. No matter the dramatic stories they may weave about us, though, I wonder how much of the actual complexity they would be able to capture from a bunch of old bones. Only time will tell. What an awesome coincidence it was that this landmark cave happened to be just an hour or two away from where we were working and living for the year!

Soon, we were driving deep within the mountains of Kurdistan, occasionally sprinkled with red poppies, and that's when I began to get this eery feeling that this was no ordinary van we'd piled into so eagerly, but rather a time machine set to take us back eons and eons into the millennia before the dawn of man. I couldn't stop gaping, like the caves that yawned here and there from the mountainsides, out the dirty window at the sheer enormity of the stone-embedded mountains and endless green valleys, interrupted by absolutely no human establishment for miles and miles and miles, so pristine, so untouched, so very prehistoric. Any second now, a dinosaur was going to pop out from behind one of the gigantic slopes, rawrrrr, I was sure of it!

Eventually, though, we began to see marks of civilization- the occasional shepherd herding his mangy-haired sheep along the mountainside, a women in black flowing robe and veil treading heavily over the uneven, stony fields, a bridge, and Bedouin tents! They come from the south, ND informed us, and it was the northern side's turn to play host to these vagabond travelers, its lush green mountains feeding their grazing animals and providing an open, unoccupied space to pitch their large, elaborate, dark brown tents. A cloudy looking river ran swiftly through the valley- the same river that fed the waterfalls of Gali Ali Beig. Near the cave, we made a stop in a tiny convenience store, where J found “Iraqi dinar rubbers”. “Say what?!” I cried. And then I remembered she was British and that they call erasers “rubbers”. We piled back into the time machine and soon, we'd arrived at the stairs leading to the legendary cave.

It looked pretty average-sized from the bottom of the stairs- like all the other caves we'd seen from the car during our various road trips through the mountains. Everywhere we'd read about it, it was said that the steps leading to the cave numbered over 400. What a major exaggeration. It took like 25 minutes to reach the cave, and that was with my camera in tow, which meant I was making long pauses to take loads of pictures of the same thing at different angles in order to capture the best one. I avoided straying too close to our driver, and politely allowed him to move on ahead every time he came back for me. By now, he had already shamelessly proposed that I marry him and take him with me to America.

The stairway was lined with tall, wild weeds and grasses and those ubiquitous red poppies, and there were these huge beetle/grasshopper-like insects (cicadas) hopping around everywhere, ew. I kept pausing and turning around to gape at the incredible mountainous vista behind me. The two mountains in the foreground formed a V-shape as they came together, like Jesus and the disciple in the Last Supper painting. The author Dan Brown would have seen more than just a natural, geographic formation there. Behind those two foreground mountains, several more faded away into the mist. Eventually, my camera and I made it to the mouth of the cave.

WoOW. It was huge. Looking into the triangular-shaped entrance was like staring into the jaws of a T-Rex right before it clamped down on you for lunch. I heard my friends inside already, disembodied voices echoing from some hideout within this huge cave. T was pretending to be the voice of the Barzanis' ancestors. They crawled on all fours out of a hole deep within the cave, close to the inner wall, but even when 6.5-foot T was standing, he looked absolutely miniscule against the sheer height of the cave. It must have been at least 50 feet high, and three times as wide, three times as deep. The white limestone inside walls were streaked beautifully with shiny black, I guess from all the fires burned from the time of the Neanderthals hundreds of thousands of years ago (when was fire discovered?) up until the present day. In the rear was a space encircled by a low stone wall- a corral, maybe for their sheep, goats, and cows? I'd read that this cave was still in use by present-day Kurds who came back every cold season and went away again in the spring. The floor was covered with light gray sand-like dirt.

At the entrance to the hole that the others had just climbed out of, I crouched down and made my own way in. It was so dark and felt slightly damp, and I hoped that there weren't any creepy-crawlies in here as I stepped forward awkwardly on my haunches like a primate. I took a picture with flash and saw that the tunnel opened up into a larger open space that was perhaps tall enough to stand straight up. The ceiling was spiky with limestone frozen in the act of dripping down. I didn't stay in there long though. It was slightly creepy and I couldn't see what sort of things lurked in the dark, if anything. I made my way step-by-step on my haunches back out of the hole. By now, my clothes were a lost cause- good thing I wore my old jeans today.

Outside of the tunnel, the enormous entrance to the cave was lit so brightly by the sun as if with divine light. There were a few other tourists visiting, standing silhouetted against this unearthly light. I meandered around, taking pictures of the streaked inner walls, the cobwebs strung across the shiny, blackened ceiling, old cow poop, and a rock pillar that looked at first glance like a man-made statue of a woman. Facing the entrance from the inside, the left-hand wall of the front of the cave looked steep but climbable. So I climbed it all the way to the top- about a dozen feet high-, where there was a window-like hole that gave an amazing view of the miles and miles of mountains and valleys below and beyond the cave.

This trek to the cave was about the coolest thing I've done in Iraq so far, I thought as I sat cradled within the frame of the natural window. It was so cool to think that I had stood where pre-human Neanderthals had stood tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, making fires and tending to their animals, scratching their heads, burying their dead. I had breathed the same air that Neanderthal lungs had breathed, seen what Neanderthal eyes had seen. I wondered if so many thousands of years ago, a Neanderthal had marveled as I marveled now at the geography of the landscape. Were their brains complex enough yet to be able to appreciate beautiful things?

Soon, it was time to go. It was a bit more precarious on the way down because I couldn't see the footholds, so I ended up just sliding down basically. By the time I left the cave, I was covered in ancient dust and dirt from Shanidar Cave. As we were about to leave, a big family of Kurds were wandering in and stood around exploring the rear of the cave. I took a picture of these modern humans whose ancestors had inhabited the cave, whose cousins continued to come back every winter season. The Kurds were a timeless people, half of them living the same sort of lifestyle lived by their ancestors, except maybe with a satellite dish in their home.

On the way back, we stopped at the river and made our way down to it. The murky, gray-brown water rushed madly by. There was the tiniest patch of dark, wet sand at the shore. This would be as close as we would ever get to a beach in Kurdistan. It stunk of cow manure and buzzed with flies.

“Oh my god!” said ND with that characteristic angry passion in her voice, her eyebrows knitted fiercely together over her huge, intense eyes. “All this cow poop just smells so good!” She stood angrily with her hands on her hips, enjoying the smell of her youth. I doubled over in laughter. “Good” was not the adjective I was expecting to hear. She had spent her childhood in a poor village in Duhok, north of Erbil, a world away from her present home in San Diego. The smell of cow poop was a source of nostalgia for her. Her wild, curly hair was positively electric with passion as she wandered barefoot along the muddy shore among the flies, determine to stay much longer than the rest of us wanted to stay.

We ended up climbing back up pretty soon though, and having tea with the Kurdish family that lived in what looked like a single-room shack- large for a shack, but small for a family with so many people. One of the older women was quite a lively character. She was dressed in the flowing dark robes of Islam, but sat with her legs spread out, chattering animatedly with J despite the language barrier. Her face looked weathered and was starting to sag, but she still wore her hair in long youthful curls that hung carelessly out of her scarf. There were five girls in the family, all very sweet and quiet while we were there at least, their serious gazes and cheap old clothes setting them so far apart from the kids we taught at the school. They sat in one row on the ledge and let me take a picture of them, one of them blushing adorably and hiding her smile with her hands when I said something to her. We left after two cups of tea. The flies were unbearable and I felt filthy from my spelunking adventure.

On the way back to the present, I stuck my earphones in my ears and watched the prehistoric landscape roll by to music from my 21st century ipod nano. Sometimes, a lone Kurdish man in the traditional baggy jumpsuit with cummerbund, or a lone woman in flowing black robes would be ambling through the plains, looking so small against the backdrop of the enormous, green, rollercoaster-ing mounds. These lone figures suddenly appeared to me to be so beautiful for their timelessness. They ambled through the plains as their ancestors ambled, wearing the same clothes their ancestors wore, living the same way of life their mothers and mothers' mothers lived- which is to say, they lived to survive and nothing more. In less than two hours, we had arrived back in the 21st century. I was back in my 21st century apartment taking a long, hot shower with running water, screaming and killing spiders with my electric vacuum, and clicking through the photos of our journey through time on my digital camera, while music streamed from my ipod into my ears. Those Bedouins have no idea what their missing out on. After the toilet, the ipod has got to be the greatest invention in human/pre-human history.

Naz City Tales: A Wandering Party (Apt. G938)

The night before, I'd been in the Naz City apartment complex, but in a different apartment. V and SJ threw an awesome joint birthday bash there with lots of people from the expat community. I took a couple shots of Yager- one with the NYer and one with SJ- and that was enough to give me a good buzz for the rest of the night. The Brit and I stood over the 9th floor balcony with our arms leaning on the ledge, watching the cars zoom by below, the tiny red light of a cigarette flurrying down 9 stories, hitting the ground and going out without a sound or a struggle. I was reminded of that one night during our way to Muscat that SJ and I spent in Dubai on a balcony, eating cheetos and grapes and watching the Arabs in their starchy white dishdashlas pacing and lounging around in the balmy night. This time, however, the Brit and I saw something even more interesting than Arabs in dishdashlas. We saw Gregory Mendel in the flesh. He was one floor below us, dressed in his brown monk's robe, and serenely watering his pea plants and simultaneously eavesdropping on the party conversations one floor up from his balcony (that would be our balcony). I contemplated watering his plants from above with beer. “YEAH, let's do it!” the Brit cried with zeal. I grabbed his bottle before it could tip upside-down. Idiot! Only he...only he would agree to such a stupid idea like that.

Wandering inside, I started up a dance party with a Baby Mickey Mouse stuffed doll, soon to be joined by a few real people. The birthday girls, for instance, the DJ, and a French expat who was here doing an internship in international law. She was the one with gorgeous, long dark curls I'd met at a previous engagement. Wandering around some more, I found myself chatting with many interesting people about their work and my work and Kurdish politics and even found myself confessing to a complete stranger my nervousness about committing to studying one thing for so long when I have so many other interests, which is exactly what I'll be doing in a year if all goes as planned. Oh well, by now, I figure I can do anything intensely for a year, even if it means hunkering down and studying my ass off at one subject- nursing. The fact that I'll get to heal sick babies and the fact that this is a universally-needed skill will be my motivation. Once equipped with it, I can take it with me wherever I go and put it to use. Oh to feel needed and useful.

Wandering back out for some fresh air, I sat on the ledge with my back against the wall, one foot on the ledge, and the other on a chair in order to keep my center of gravity on the inside of the balcony, as the unusually high-shouldered host put it. At night, this was a fairly pretty view, with lights twinkling from the buildings, many only half-constructed, or fully-constructed but vacant. At one point, the generator shut off briefly, all went dark, and I imagined the collective sigh of all the occupants in all the buildings across the city. Rising higher than any other building was the round form of the ancient citadel. In a few weeks, all this will be nothing more than memories, eh Ang? Of course this was the fate of all events no matter how major, no matter how inconsequential. Time marches inevitably on, and whatever is, was, and whatever will be, is, like an endless procession pointed in a single direction forward- or backward if you're from the Aymara tribe. Why did I find that so damn interesting? Too bad useless philosophical wonderings like this won't help save lives.

“I've never met a girl like you,” said C. Oooh, he'd hit me in a weak spot. It's been awhile since anyone's said that to me. I jumped off the ledge, suddenly nervous about the closeness.

“Wait 'til you meet my sister- we're twins.” I walked away laughing. Taxi was here. Time to go home.

Naz City Tales: The Incredibles (Apt. D314, aka the Pie Room)

I visited a family today in Erbil, at one of the Naz City highrise apartments. When the father opened the door, the first thing I saw was a tiny little girl in a tiny little yellow sleeveless dress with colorful rhinestones on the front. This was D's little sister, the image of a little South Asian pixie with short, glossy black curls and dark eyes alight with merriment. She was a mere 2-and-a-half years old, but she was feisty and fearless. The dress was from India. They were originally from Kerala in South India, also known as “God's own country” because of it's stunning natural beauty. I googled it later and saw that it looks a lot like Oman but greener and even more paradise-like, and with elephants. Looks like I'm adding another country to my list of travel destinations.

D came out of the bathroom. “Hey D, how's it going?” I gave him a hug. We sat on the couch and he told me about how he had visited two friends today, and they had played hide-and-seek and Gameboy. He's such a sweet kid. I never noticed this before, but I discovered that he has a nervous laugh. I don't think he's even aware that he does it, but it's very endearing. His sister is a riot. She stood at the doorway to the living room and wouldn't stop laughing hysterically for no apparent reason. I couldn't help laughing back. I love it when kids do that. Too bad when adults do it, they just sound crazy.

His father was opening up a Majidi Mall from Kuwait here in Kurdistan. They'd lived in Kuwait before coming to Erbil, and every holiday, they returned to Kerala to visit their homeland and family. As I asked them questions, I was shocked to discover that all of D's academic brilliance and hard work, particularly in math and science, was self-driven. His parents had both studied humanities and seemed to have no particular interest in math or science, and neither seemed terribly curious about D's academics. On the contrary, his father had been wondering if D picked a lot of fights with the other kids because that's what he had done at D's age. Wow, this kid was even more amazing than I'd figured.

His sister never stopped roaming around the spacious living room, and we watched amused and amazed as she climbed to the top of the couch and jumped fearlessly down into a sitting position, over and over again. She was a born thrill-seeker, a born mountain climber with not a scared bone in her tiny little doll-like body. What an incredible family. Most of all, I loved how the parents were so nonchalant and relaxed about their amazing children. Later, over dinner at Bakery & More, I noticed that his father seemed to know quite a few Kurdish words. It turns out he could speak Kurdish* after just one year here, as well as 9 other languages. Christ, they weren't human, this family; they were the Incredibles in disguise! Who knew there was a family of superheroes living in the middle of Erbil?

Before leaving for Bakery & More, I'd mentioned that I might buy a bag of bread while I was there. As we were getting up from the table after the big dinner, D asked “Did you say you wanted to buy bread downstairs?” I was surprised that he even remembered I'd said that. It's a nice feeling when you don't think anyone's really listening, but it turns out someone was, even if it was a really inconsequential comment. It's an amazing feeling when the one who was listening was an 8-year-old kid. Before leaving the table, D went around pushing all the chairs in while even his parents and sister were already going down the stairs. I stayed and helped him carry out this ritual of manners which he'd probably learned at school. During the car ride home, he held a CD in his hand, which his father had just given to me because I'd said I liked a song on it.

“Look,” D said suddenly, pointing to the back of the passenger seat. A milky reflection in the shape of a CD was cast on it. I told him if he held it under other lights, it would make an entire rainbow of colors. We held it under other lights and watched as thin, web-like neon lines spun in circles as the car moved quickly from one light source to another. Years later, I thought as I watched him, he was going to remember how mesmerized he'd been by lights on CD surfaces when he was little, just as I'd remembered years later how I would squint at various degrees from the darkness of my bedroom to change the shape of the light in the hallway, and then squeeze my eyes shut and pretend to sleep as I heard my father coming home from work. By the time he remembers, though, maybe CD's will be extinct.

*Kurdish is similar to Malayalam, their native tongue, which I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by, since they are both from the same Indo-Iranian language family. They both originated in the Caucasus, brought down by the Aryans, so it makes sense that a lot of their words sound similar.